I stood at the trailhead, trying to look like a mountain biker. 

My husband and I were on our first holiday without children in nearly two decades, and we reckoned I could make it through the trail. Its ‘least difficult’ ranking was marked by a little green dot on the map. I knew our ride would get more challenging on later trails marked with ‘more difficult’ blue squares, but I decided the beauty of the scenery and the freedom from teenagers could inspire me through anything. 

Our guide gave us a quick lesson on how to ride the rental mountain bikes. I couldn’t believe how comfortable the Santa Cruz felt compared to my road bike back home. I admired its wide tyres and had fun playing with its dropper seat post. The ultra-sensitive hydraulic disc brakes required some getting used to, so we all practised braking in the parking lot. After about 15 minutes, I felt ready for the trail. 

Within the first kilometre, I went from trying to relax to trying to stay vertical. We started pedalling over sand and quickly graduated to zooming over rocks, some of which felt like jagged boulders under my tyres. I constantly fought the urge to brake, and I kept forgetting to keep my pedals level on descents to avoid hitting rocks. Even when I was doing everything the guide said I should do, I kept thinking I would fall. 

“Now that I’ve fallen, I can stop worrying about falling.”

After about 10 minutes on the trail, I did fall. I was scratched but fine, even relieved. “Now that I’ve fallen, I can stop worrying about falling,” I thought. I got back on my bike, but the fear intensified. I worried about every rock, every change in elevation. Will my bike make it over that rock? Should I swerve? Sometimes there was no safe option, so I’d engage in split-second risk assessments. Would it be less painful to get scraped by a bush or fall sideways at low speed? I stopped suddenly and frequently, causing the riders behind me to stop too, risking a pile-up. When I started pedalling again, I couldn’t keep momentum, even though I knew momentum was the only thing that would get me through.

“Pedal, pedal, pedal!” my husband yelled. 

I swallowed the words I wanted to yell back at him. 

I knew my overwhelming fear was more extreme than the situation demanded, but I couldn’t take it down any notches. I wondered if my panic was making it more likely I’d fall.

In Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, author Eva Holland wondered the same thing while climbing with friends in a remote part of Canada. She made it up the mountain; but on the way down, she imperilled both herself and the friends who helped her descend as the temperature dropped and the light waned.

Holland later researched what happened to her on that mountain. One study published in the Journal of Vestibular Research felt particularly true to her experience of acrophobia, or fear of heights. It suggested that excessive fear of falling made subjects too reliant on visual cues, including locking their heads in place instead of looking around at their surroundings, and made them more likely to fall than other people. She wrote, “a once rational response to a reasonable concern feeds on itself, growing and spreading to the point where I can hardly stand on a sturdy stepladder.”

The confidence I’d felt while zipping around the parking lot fell every time my body did. During one descent, I wasn’t riding fast enough over a long slab of rock and my front tyre skidded along its edge, causing me to crash again. I picked up my bike and shambled to the side of the trail, hoping no one could see the tears behind my sunglasses.

“Pass me, please!” I shouted to the group, my voice cracking. “I’m just going to walk from here.” 

A few encouraged me to keep going. “You’re doing fantastically!” they lied. “You can do this!” 

I just stood there, frozen in the summer heat, unable to stop crying. 

The guide eventually pointed us to a shortcut and I pedalled back to the parking lot with my husband. I got off that beautiful bike with its unrealised potential, and leaned it against a fence post.

I was baffled and ashamed that I’d let fear force me off the trail. I’ve been riding bikes for nearly four decades. Until now, I’d never let scrapes and bruises – or fear of getting injured – keep me from activities I enjoy. 

I felt motivated to redeem myself. I got back on the bike and rode over to the map at the trailhead to scan it for another green-dotted trail. Then I felt something I’d never felt before on a bike: dread. The thought of getting back on any mountain bike trail made my breath quicken and my heart race. Before I could try mountain biking again, I had to figure out what went wrong. 

Was my meltdown really about mountain biking? Or was it about not being able to handle my fear?

Mountain bikers love to talk about fear.  In the 2018 documentary Reverence: A Journey Into Fear, pro after pro opines on the subject before confronting it on some unbelievable run of rock, air and speed. Their fears are as distinctive as the lines they take through the mountains. We see what they do on their bikes, and we hear what it takes for them to do it. 

Even with all their skill and experience, new challenges are a head game. One thinks he’s having a panic attack. Another meditates. Free-rider Matt MacDuff says, “Fear doesn’t actually exist. Fear is a choice that you make.”

Few people traverse the extreme edge of an extreme sport like those athletes do, but most of us are wired for fear. Whenever we sense a danger, real or perceived, the amygdala – a small structure deep inside the temporal lobe of the brain – triggers the hypothalamus, which puts into motion the ‘fight-or-flight’ response of the sympathetic nervous system: the heart rate speeds up, the muscles tense, the breath shortens. 

Some degree of fear isn’t a bad thing on a mountain bike. “It blends a highly technical sport with an adrenaline sport, a very fast sport,” says Jody Radtke, a counsellor who works with outdoor athletes. “There are very real potential impacts.”

By the time we’d gone on the holiday I’ve described, I’d seen some of them. My husband has been mountain biking for 20 years, and has come home from rides gashed, bruised and battered. He has been seriously hurt twice. In 2015, he hit a tabletop jump with too much speed and crashed on the landing, shattering his collarbone. A surgeon put it back together with rods and screws I can feel under his skin. 

A few years later, he clipped a rock with his pedal and skidded into a tree, separating his shoulder. The same doctor offered to operate “for cosmetic reasons” but assured him surgery wasn’t necessary. The shoulder healed on its own, though an egg-sized knob now pokes up when he moves his left arm in certain ways.

Despite the inherent risks, mountain biking has plenty of mental health benefits. Authors of an article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology surveyed 1 484 mountain bikers, finding they “reported copious benefits to mental health and well-being”. Lead author Lisa Roberts, who now works as an occupational therapist for the NHS in the UK, said she was surprised to find that one in three respondents “recognised that they proactively already use mountain biking as a coping mechanism” for low-level stress, anxiety and depression.

I’ve observed how this plays out with my husband. The harried, stressed-out guy who hits the trail after work is different from the one who comes back. After one or two hours of hard riding, he’s relaxed and in a better mood. He says mountain biking gives his brain a rest – you can’t think of anything else. There’s no zoning out. To stay safe, you must focus on what you’re riding, and only on what you’re riding.

Psychologists call this total immersion in one activity a state of ‘flow’. There are many benefits to flow, including making people feel happier and more creative. 

RELATED: How to Conquer Your Fear of Riding Fast

My husband and I pursue different pathways to the flow state. He likes to pedal to the edge of what he can do, while I enjoy attention-consuming activities mostly devoid of danger. I kayak on flat water and ride on tar. I run the same few forest trails because I know where all the tricky roots, rocks and drops are. Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly gone out of my way to not feel afraid. 

I began to wonder if my efforts to avoid fear altogether had made me unable to handle even subtle shades of it. What I experienced on that trail was not life-threatening, but I reacted as though it were. I wondered if my extreme fight-or-flight response might be signalling a problem with my mental health.

“You didn’t have a mental health crisis out there,” says sports psychologist Susan Sotir, who coaches endurance athletes. “You had a skill imbalance and coping-choice blip. Your coping skills were not adequate to the situation, because your skill set was being challenged too severely.”

I decided to try mountain biking again, but this time I’d prepare better. If I felt afraid again, Sotir suggested using a strategy known as problem-focused coping, where you address the problem (‘I can’t do this!’) to manage the fear (‘I’m going to get hurt!’). She suggested examining all the actions I could take – everything from throwing the bike down and running away to riding on the wheel of someone who knows what they’re doing. Switching the focus from my emotions to the problem would immediately lower the temperature of the situation.

To get to a place where I could put one of these solutions in place, however, I would have to deal with my overactive sympathetic nervous system. To slow it down, I would first need to fix my breathing. Inhale slowly, exhale slowly. Tell the brain there’s no problem in the body. Broaden my base of support on the ground, and rub my hands together in a soothing self-massage. Look around. Identify five things I see, three things I hear, one thing I can touch. Quiet the inner noise. Then act.

I knew where I wanted to try mountain biking again. A particular river gorge, a place I knew well, having taken our girls there to whitewater raft and hike. To prepare, I watched how-to videos and visualised riding obstacles. Sometimes, while falling asleep, I imagined myself pedalling up a steep bank of rocks, just about to fall, when I startled myself awake.

My lesson was at 10am, with 26-year-old guide Aspen Handy. We began on the pump track. I was riding a Trek Marlin 7, which costs much less than the bike I rode on holiday but felt just as comfortable. Or maybe I was just in a better headspace. 

We practised riding some obstacles that Aspen set up, and while I nailed the first one – riding over half a PVC pipe on the ground – I struggled with others: a short drop, a rock garden, and a skinny plank of wood perched on a log like a see-saw. I watched Aspen go over each of them effortlessly.

“Fear isn’t the enemy with this sport; it’s the beacon.”

When I felt anxious, I got off the bike. I breathed slowly. I felt the ground under my feet. 

“Try yelling something,” Aspen suggested. Shouting is a way to let out the nervous energy. An overthinker herself, she yells “No brakes!” when cruising toward a difficult obstacle. I tried shouting “Level pedals!” but it just seemed like one more thing to remember to do. 

Aspen made me go over an obstacle several times, even if I got it once. I didn’t fall. We had about 30 minutes left when she declared me ready for an easy loop. I followed her on a short course that had a sharp turn, a log, a moderate uphill climb, slippery roots, puddles and some low-hanging tree branches. 

I rode so slowly. What I expected to be the hardest thing – the log – I managed easily, on all three loops. The turn was easy the first time, and I missed it the second. I handled a mud-covered rock the second time, but not the first or the last. I felt best on the climb, but twice had to get off the bike on the downhill. 

Nevertheless, Aspen said she was proud of me for getting out of my comfort zone. She told me to work on not overthinking things, insisting again that I had the skills to cope.

I collected my thoughts in a nearby restaurant and reassessed whether comfort should be my goal. Because I was already comfortable running, kayaking and road biking. 

Mountain biking was different. People love it because there’s always another challenge, another limit to push. Fear isn’t the enemy with this sport; it’s the beacon.

Even though I knew I’d never attempt feats like the pros, or even moderately dangerous things like my husband does, I had just come closer to finding the fun in fear. I didn’t have to look like I knew what I was doing. I could just ride at my own pace, on beginner trails, for as long as it took to get better. When I overcame my fear there, I knew I’d be able to find it again somewhere else. There’s always fear in mountain biking. 

No brakes! 

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