Stokesville Mountainbike Festival

Dear Readers,

Our good friend Kita recently traveled to the Stokesville Mountainbike Festival and had an amazing time. She was kind enough to do write up about her experience. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

A few years ago I bought my first bike and asked a client from my shop starts showing me some trails. I quickly discovered Mountainbiking is hard and I have no idea what I am doing. It's also apparent, that there is no lineage of athletic superstars in my family. No ounce of inherent or natural coordination or skill. 

It was incredibility fun and challenging which is perhaps what kept me coming back for more in the first few months of black and blue bruises I earned from mistakes made and lessons learned while winding my way through the trails of Fair Hill or the rolling loop of Lums. There was nothing about this that I could learn from a book - it was all a hard earned discovery of something I never knew I was able to do. It wasn’t easy, didn’t come to me overnight, and still bites at me over how far I am not, but it’s for all of these reasons that I clip back in every time. The desire is there to grow better every time, to put your head down and pedal is born.

Photo: kita

A few years go by and I find myself loving all that is bikes and am trying to put effort in, pin down some goals, and grow some skills. I get to hear stories that inspire me of regular weekend rides and epic undertakings. If you know Buddy Briggs, you only have to listen to one of his stories of a place to want to take on the challenge of a new terrain with the way he talks about every second of trail. When he mentioned the Stokesville Mountain Biking Festival after the tales of his Shenandoah 100 rides, I was all in. I put my head down and road a little more with a new target.

photo: Laura Graziano Farabaugh

On the ride down in a camper loaded with bikes, beer, and food, I got to listen to Ben and Buddy talk about rides, races, and memories and I started to worry that I had taken too big a bite. I thought that maybe I was chasing trails that I wasn’t yet prepared for as the terrain outside the window grew lush, green, and more real. We arrived and hit the trails as soon as we had a place set up to hang out bikes.

The short loop around the campground gave a great taste of what was to come. Swooping berms, a few rocks, and a climb out and around the tents to start it all over again. I wasn’t in Kansas any more and already Buddy and Ben were chomping and I was racing to keep up. The trails were swift, fun, but different in so many way. It was going to be a killer weekend.

Photo:Buddy the leg breaker

Rides divided up after group breakfast on Saturday and I took to the trails with a new group of women to test out Narrowback and Tillmans - both of which did not disappoint - and I was pleased to discover that I could hang pretty well out there in the mountains.

Photo: Kita

photo: Kita

Sunday I had ambitions of a longer more challenging ride than the day before and grouped up with Bill, Laura, and Jill of the Henry’s Team. We climbed up the road to for Lookout to the Wild Oaks Trails where I stuck on Laura’s wheel over trails foreign to me. The long climb up quickly taught me these weren’t the punchy mashable hills of home and made me spin for what felt like forever. Once cresting over the top, the jagged rocks forced me to loosen my grip and roll with the bike downward back towards camp. This was mountain biking. It’s what it is meant to be. It’s suffering more than you knew you could to cramp and smile all at the same time. It’s obscenities yelled at Mother Nature herself for the splendor and effort she has laid out before you. It is getting to the top and feeling like you beat something inside of you that you didn’t know was holding you back. It is knowing you can rise to the challenge again.

Photo: Bill Batchelor

It was exhilarating. I was slow and yet I road technical things I would have never considered back home. I was faster than I thought it parts and a few times my Garmin politely beeped to remind me I was standing still despite what felt like all I had to get over the crest of a ledge.  I crashed pretty well off twice causing the ride back to be a little uncomfortable. At the bottom, I thanked my friends for their combined patience with me and settled in for a few moments to myself. The ride was by no means the experienced smooth ride that you guys are used to seeing on this blog. But it was my ride. And I am damned proud of it. More proud than I have ever been of a ride. I was broken for the day, but I wasn’t defeated.

Photo: Bill Batchelor

It wasn’t just about the trails I conquered that day, it was about the stories shared back at camp of all the rides that went out that day or in years past, about the stories that everyone had. It was the successes and the crashes of all of us we shared as a community, as a family. It was lining up at dinner with strangers to quickly find are friends through association and want to just chat about the same thing. It was not one kind of ride, but all of them, for everyone. Groups going out strangers and pushing one another through. It was new friends over bourbon and mud covered laughter while waiting for showers. It was the core of what the mountain biking community has been to me actualized.

I left one day 5 years ago on a ride with people I barely knew and came back with a tribe. Stokesville is that community, together for the love of riding and Chris and his team have done an amazing job of cultivating it.

Stokesville Mountain Biking Festival left me bruised and sore, but it also left me grinning from ear to ear, stoking a bike high that has me already daydreaming at work of the next adventure.