How To Jump A Bicycle

 A Guide for Old People

 First, I don't mean how to jump over a bicycle.  I mean how to go over a jump on your bicycle.  I hope that was clear.  If not, let's probably don't bother to read on.

 Online you'll find... I don't know - hundreds? of videos breaking down every moment of the act of getting air and successfully landing.  Watch all of those you want.  I don't think they'll be of any help.  From a technical standpoint there's really only one thing you need to know; stand up.  Don't try to do it while seated.

But that's it.  Otherwise the way to do it is to just go do it.  Sadly, this perfectly serviceable advice nugget has been ruined by people trying to sell sneakers, but if we can get past that for a moment I can explain what I mean.  Then you can go buy your sneakers. 

It just isn't possible or even reasonable to expect a video to break down every critical moment of a jump for you, and you wouldn't have time to recall all of it in real time anyway.  You eventually just have to jump and feel it out.  You have to put yourself in the situation and feel your way through it.  That's the hard part because a healthy, sensible fear will stand in your way.  

The way to break through that isn't strictly mental toughness.  I mean - that doesn't hurt, but the answer is to become super comfortable with bike riding in general and develop a keen sense of balance.  With both wheels on the ground, get good at taking your bike over all sorts of surfaces and become generally adept at negotiating the everyday turns, hills, and dips etc.  You need a ton of confidence with the bike on the ground before you're ready to get airborne.

Crossing that line to liftoff still takes guts, but more confidence gained = less guts required.

If you have this foundation going in, your first attempt shouldn't be the disaster you might fear.  You might come up short or land a little wrong, but with solid fundamentals you're hedging your bets that you'll be able to ride out of it.  

Denouement: when you're up there in the air even for that brief moment you should quickly get a feel for it.  It should make sense to you.  That's where you learn.  Then it's just a matter of dialing it in the same way you did with everything else.  

Now go shred some gnar, brah!

 

Three Cheers for the Guardrails

The Internet of course is a mess, but I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the time we're in with it right now, because... well, at the risk of sounding like an old fogey, the standard of decency tends to devolve.  Each generation lowers the bar a little bit.  I don't mean to sound too judgemental of that.  I think it's empirically true that priorities shift and what was important for one generation to protect just isn't even on the RADAR of the next.  The song "Anything Goes" which complains about this perceived moral erosion was written in 1934.

 Oops I got off on a tangent about this but "perceived" is really the key word.  It's generational perspective, and I don't think that each generation gets together and holds a conference to decide what does and doesn't matter to them.  I don't know what happens, but the collective consciousness somehow seems to tune into the same wavelength and change the standard of what matters and what doesn't - the ambient decency.  I'm sure my generation did it.  A glimpse of stocking most definitely was looked on as something shocking, but at some point skirts went above the knee and it just didn't matter.

So for as much of a mess as the current internet is, I'm happy that the really terrible stuff (and you know it's out there) still remains very hidden.  Maybe I'm wrong about that but even in a time when it seems you're never more than one typo or errant click away from naked boobies, there still remains a "dark web" where new categories of abhorrent are surely being invented every day.  I really don't know who or what is responsible for keeping that stuff so hidden, but ultimately it remains that way because it violates the current collective moral standard, and that's great but if anything I just wrote above is true, the clock is ticking.