A year ago I rarely wore knee pads mountain biking and I almost never left home with a helmet that wasn’t a simple pad-fit bucket but that changed with shocking immediacy when the Clairebarian started riding. Fair enough, one of my goals as a parent is to be wary of my own hypocrisies so when she started riding and crashing regularly on the North Shore and we decided that a full-face helmet was a requirement on single track for Claire she decided it was a requirement for me as well.
And here’s my theory. If I’m going to wear that damned chin bar on XC trails I used to high-post in lycra then I should probably wear it on trails I’m more likely to eat shit riding. I’ve been mountain biking a long time and still have most of my own teeth, so it’s not that I’m not perfectly confident riding in a bucket. It’s just I can’t imagine dragging myself home missing a few teeth and having to explain why I wasn’t wearing my mandatory safety equipment.
And so, we showed up in Cumberland, BC for The Clairebarian’s first riding trip with chin bars in tow. The extensive network of Blue trails was perfect for Claire. We easily accomplished her longest rides ever, by distance and time, on the rolling terrain and she crashed less in three days of riding than she does in an average 15-minute period on Fromme or Seymour.
Most certainly, if we lived in Cumberland, the risk assessment teaching her to ride would not have included full-face helmets and I can say with absolute certainty that her mama and I would not be wearing ours for a Blues-cruise and probably not for the Black and Double Black trails either.
We have a good system and it takes under a minute for Claire and me to remove or install both our chin pieces but we still tend to leave them in place climbing, traversing, and descending on singletrack. Even, as it turns out, on singletrack where we’re flowing up and down without any of the random yard sales that a ride on the North Shore generates.
As we plan to come back next year and think about other rolling riding locals we’d like to visit it becomes a real conundrum about how hard we’re going to stick to our always-chin-bar riding strategy. It’s a real slippery slope between wearing a chin bar any time we’re on actual trails and me being back in a bucket for 99% of my riding!