i'm lyndsey

Note: I have tried and tried to put a jump in this post, without any success. I apologize for the length.

I like to mountain bike, meaning I like to ride my mountain bike around on trails, sometimes trails that head in a general downhill direction, and sometimes I can maneuver over small logs, roots, rocks, etc. 

My boyfriend on the other hand, rides a BMX bike and can do all sorts of tricks on his bike, including his latest trick, the front flip. It’s rather scary to watch. Anyways, my point here, is that I often have gone to watch him ride his bike, and often at the giant indoor bike park about 45 minutes from where we live, called Joyride 150. They have everything a bike enthusiast could ever want, but I’ve always been too intimidated to bring my bike and try out some of the stuff. There’s always all these guys there doing all these tricks and making it all look so easy, I just couldn’t see myself making a fool of myself trying to do the simplest of things.

That is, until Joyride 150 announced their second annual Women’s Weekend. The park would be open to women only, and there would be clinics set up at each of the different areas for riding, geared towards beginners who are trying to figure it out, or women trying to improve their skills in certain areas. Both were me. With some prompting from my boyfriend, I went for it and signed up.

Here’s where I’m going to put in a jump link, which never seem to work for me, so I apologize in advance…

Am I ever glad I did! It was an amazing day, I tried things I thought I was to scared to try, I DID things, I thought I was too scared to try, I met some awesome ladies, and best of all, now I can’t wait to go back!

So without further babbling from here, I’ll share the day via photos.

There were about 100 ladies out for the day, more than could fit into a photo, but here we are at the start of the day, ready to hear how our day is going to work, and meet the instructors. There were ladies from age 7-70, I swear, it was pretty cool.

These are our awesome instructors. All of which can do awesome stuff on their bikes, and were eager to share their knowledge with us.

One of the instructors happened to be my boyfriend. Here he is introducing himself.

This is just a small part of the park, the beginner area. Here I did my first ever teeter-totter on my bike. 

I learned and had a lot of fun on the pump track. I love the feeling of rolling over the hills, so smooth and rhythmic. Here’s me on the pump track, and one on the burm.

One of my biggest goals for the day was to get up the courage to jump into the foam pit. I didn’t have to do any fancy tricks, just jump in. I did it! Twice! First jump in I kind of forgot the key instruction to lean back slightly when going off the jump and ended up face first into the foam. Which then brought on fear #2, suffocating in the foam. Luckily I got myself flipped right side up fairly quickly, but getting out of that pit was way way harder than getting in! Jump 2 went much better, I landed pretty flat before being pitched forward, that is kinda the goal. Unfortunately, didn’t get any pictures of my doing it, but here’s a picture of someone else jumping in, doing something way cooler (front flip) than I did, but you get the idea of what the foam pit is all about. 

Finally it was time to go try out some real jumps. Although they are small, and Dave calls it the baby line, I loved every single minute of it! I went down this row of jumps at least 40 times. Mostly on other people’s bikes, as my cross country mountain bike isn’t really built for jumping. This also made me really really want a new bike. Time to get a jumper! So here I am, jumping on a bike!

It was an awesome day of riding, I was there for about 6 hours, with a break for lunch, and a few other small breaks, but by mid afternoon my body was exhausted. It takes a lot out of you doing all of that pumping with our legs and pushing and pulling of your handle bars. My legs were sore, my back was sore, my shoulders were dead… but I felt amazing!