Madison's 2nd MTB Ride

Sunday Madison and I went on her second mountain bike ride. This time I took her on another of my lunch rides the V&T or railroad grade. This trail has options to either do technical stuff or not so it was good practice for her and she did not have to do the hard stuff if she did not want to.

Here she is going down the first set of little hills. They seem little to us but to her, it was huge. She was pretty tired from the weekend (basketball and soccer games) and a late night the night before (see previous post) so she was not to hip on the climbing this time. She would hessitate for a few minutes at the top and have this scared look on her face but she would do the downhill.

Here she is at the turn around point of the trail. Taking a breather and being all proud of herself. She is still learning all the technical stuff so I warn her in advance of any obsticles and tell her how to menuver or how to avoid that section. There is one point in the trail that is real narrow and goes around a corner and on the one side is a steep hill. Here is a picture of my buddy Todd falling at that very spot. Ok, there was some snow involved, whatever. So I tell Madison about the turn and that if she gets scared she can just walk that section. I go first and stop to turn and watch her and she practically ran me over she was behind me the whole time and said that it was no big deal.

The other fear that she concured was a steep little hill with lots of loose sand on it. We walked up the hill on the way in and now it was time to go down that hill. She hesitated for quite a while on this one and was truly scared. She would not let me take her bike and have her walk she wanted to do the hill. She finally let it rip and almost lost it in the sand but recovered and made it down. Her poor little face had a look of terror on it as she was coming down but she was so happy afterwards.

She said she prefers the other trail we did but this one was ok and she would do it with me again. She also mentioned more than once that she had fun biking with me so I know it was a good experience for her. We also saw lots of butterflies and a rabbit! She loved that part as well.