Trust but verify: You bike shop might not be the expert you think it is

Black Betty begging for better brakes,
barely before
I almost bailed off a bad-ass bluff

Doing 35 miles per hour while heading down a 10 percent grade into a double-S curve is not a good place for your brakes to fail.

Trust me. I checked.

But after slamming into a retaining wall during the aforementioned brake failure, I'm now an expert on mountain bike brakes. Or at least a whole lot more informed.

"I can fix this once," my surgeon said. "Not twice."

Looking back at that statement drives home my point: Trusting my bike shop was a nice thing, but following my instincts and verifying that trust was more important. After all, my rear brakes failed continuously for more than a year after I purchased my first real mountain bike.

In fact, I brought my bike into the shop to look at my rear brakes about 10 times in that first year.

Then, nine months after my crash and two weeks before my wife and I were heading out on a month-long trip that was heavy on cycling, I brought my bike in.

Again.

Same place I bought it, same place where no one could quite figure out how to fix it – beyond a test ride in the parking lot.

I'm ashamed of the whole sordid affair. I feel dirty. I've been riding bikes my entire life, and I didn't think I was a dreaded "newbie" when it came to mountain bike riding.

But I guess I was, a little bit. And to this day, I'm still shocked I never went to the Google Machine to research my brakes.

Verify, every step of the way

This is a good lesson for all levels of mountain bikers, even experts. Because after time, we tend to trust people. And that's a good thing.

But we need to remember to verify that trust. Especially when we're really busy and all we want to do is hit the trails and reach high rates of velocity while encountering dips, drops, boulders, rivers, rattlesnakes, and sometimes even Satan himself.

Trust is a great thing for people to earn, but if it's unfounded or begins to erode, things can go awry quickly.

Because they were cool, I disregarded my gut feeling that the employees at my shop either didn't know what they were doing, didn't care, or were nickel-and-diming me. That's why you should verify everything your bike shop says and does.

Or you'll end up in surgery, like me.

I'd ridden what I previously thought were mountain bikes for 20 years all around Chicagoland. And I'd ridden what I knew were real mountain bikes in places as near as Colorado and as far as Switzerland. But that was nothing.

I hadn't lived the life of a true believer, like I do here in Asheville, NC, where I'm wasting time unless I'm out on the trails.

So I quickly came to trust my bike shop. Everyone there seemed totally cool, why worry? This led me to foolishly disregard my subconscious when I would ask the important question that Jason, my bike sensei, kept telling me to ask: "Did you bleed my brakes?"

It was always a difficult conversation when I asked that question, because no one ever gave me a straight answer. They had 10 tries and each time, they mumbled their responses.

Know your limits ...at least mechanically

Not to mention, the arithmetic doesn't add up: Hydraulic + system = me out of my element.

Not that I don't try to understand. But I'm a writer, I work with words and stories. If you put a tool in my hand that isn't a keyboard, it just might end up sticking out of my eye socket.

So I need a bike shop. Desperately. Because, while I'm a decent mountain bike rider, I'm a passionate guy. When I find something I love doing, I throw myself into it. All the way.

What else is there?

Then push through those limits

So I'm on a quest to become an expert mountain biker. I live in the right place. My heart is in it for all the right reasons. And I'm almost on the right bike.

I'm fed up with people taking advantage of the trust I place in them. I think I found a new bike shop, but we'll see how it goes. So far, so good.

This is what happens when you treat people like you would want them to treat you. They might just write a long-ass blog post about you.

Not yet, but soon.

Until then, see you on the trails, my friends.