PR Meditation

Saturday morning I rode the PR (the "Private Reserve", a local spot with good MTB/hike trails). This is a strange time of year, when warm temperatures release mud and riding becomes bad for the trails. Now that I have studded tires on my bike, I much prefer mountain biking below freezing, when the surfaces are harder and I can't contribute to erosion. The weekend forecast was Springlike, so literally too warm to ride. The best chance for a ride was Sat. morning, ending around 9 when the forecast rose to melting.

The trails were about half frozen, so I was glad to have the studs as the terrain meandered among snow, dirt, ice and rock. But the studs are less grippy on the ice than I had expected, and they're worse than summer tires on rock. The melting snow exposed scarier parts of the trails, hidden for months now, and its smooth contours yielded to the rougher trail textures. Put together, the trails felt harder than I expected. This was worst on the bridges, homemade stream crossings in various states of disrepair across the PR.

I felt thoroughly limited by my mental state. This feels ironic in what looks like a physical sport, but that got me thinking about yoga. According to my book, yoga has been practiced for millenia and is seen as a form of meditation, though it too looks (and usually feels to me) purely physical. (I am a rank beginner at yoga and barely past that stage in MTB.) I would like to chat with a yoga expert and an MTB expert on whether MTB can be a meditation in the way yoga can be. I suspect there's at least a bit of overlap.