Back in the day, when I was young and impervious to hitting trees while careening downhill at 25 MPH on a bike, I 
fancied myself a pretty good rider. I was heavily into mountain biking, had traveled to its two Meccas: Crested Butte, Colorado (twice) and Moab, Utah. I had invested a small nation’s GDP into titanium bike bits. We rode several times per week, eventually getting to the point where we could do advanced, technical trails with expert-class race speed. Our clan could out-ride almost anyone on the trail, and we got technically skilled enough where clearing 3’ boulders and 50” drop-offs was something we’d do without thinking. We wouldn’t give foot-deep mud, sand or the heaviest rain so much as a passing thought.
Yes, we were young and arrogant, but we did have some skill. At least we did back then when what we had was considered skill at all.
As happens many times in life, you think you’re good at something until someone better comes along and, like a stern father, smacks you upside the head to make you realize that no, you ain’t all that. Those are painful lessons, but here’s the rub: usually when you see people who are better at something, you can aspire to get to that level and learn what they’ve learned. That’s how you evolve as an athlete, right? Observation and emulation?
Not today, I guess. The video below has demonstrated to me a few things:
- I had no talent whatsoever back then.
- There is no way I could ever do what’s on display here, even given a budget of a million years and unlimited face replacement surgeries.
- Young’uns today are probably robots and we should all fear for our lives, because we are weak.
So yeah, as it turns out, I was never a good bike rider. Because this is what that would look like.
The word you’re looking for is insane.
Anyway, here’s the best the Internet had to offer this week. Enjoy.
- Turns out that Lebanon, Kansas is the geographic center of the lower 48 contiguous United States.
- Who’s winning the smartphone wars? In a nutshell, Microsoft and Nokia are losing ground, RIM and Apple are growing, and it’s too early to make the call with Google/Android.
- Probably the funniest Twitter account I’ve seen in a long time. Too bad it’s probably a gimmick.
- Marco Arment on the media’s juvenile tendency to remove ‘cuss’ words from quotes and other direct sources. As Marco says, aren’t we getting a little old for this?
- Here are the basic mathematics of a zombie attack, via the abstract of a new paper [PDF] in Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress. Nerdery ahoy.
- Insatiable creatures: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess.
- Finally, Don Wildman quite likely is the world’s healthiest 75-year old man. And by ‘healthiest’ I mean ‘can easily outgun most 25-year-olds in just about anything’.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
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Jeff–the reason you couldn’t ride your bike this well is because you didn’t ride while listening to Bryan Adams. Had you done that you would’ve soared. Just sayin….