Three Days of Hiking before the Race Ever Started.

This was my first downhill race. I've spent the last couple years covering NOMBS, the Northern Ohio Mountain Bike Series, which is cross country. So I got to Holimont on Friday, set up camp, and spent the next two and a half days hiking the resort up and down before the race started, practicing along the way.

Friday afternoon the gravel roads in were quiet and well kept, almost undiscovered feeling. State land, campsites tucked along the sides you could just pull into. I hardly saw another person. It felt remote, but I knew if I hiked twenty or thirty minutes I'd be standing at the top of the lift, watching people mountain bike.

The first stand of trees I walked through was all tall pine, with a fern understory so open you could see a long way through the woods. I don't know if fire had cleared it out at some point, but it felt clean, not sterile. Loamy soil underfoot, trails connecting to more trails like a little community up there, easy to find your way because you could see through to the next one. Day one was sunny. Day two went overcast, and the light filtering through all that fern reminded me a little of the Pacific Northwest.

I didn't buy a lift ticket. Partly because sixty dollars is sixty dollars I can't casually spend right now. But also because there's no better way to learn a trail than to walk it yourself, more than once, in more than one light.

Curtis was the first person I talked to, standing at the top of the lift by the trail map. He struck up the conversation, unhurried, present, choosing his words like he meant every one of them. Dan, the lift operator, was a different kind of energy, quick and curious, and walked up to me the second day when he clocked my tripod. First thing he said was make sure I stayed off the bike trails. Once I explained what I was doing, he waved me off, told me I could go wherever I wanted. Chris I met at the crest of a trail, pedaling back up to hit a jump he'd built but hadn't ridden yet. We talked for a minute before he took off toward it. Later he passed me again under the lift line and said hello, remembered who I was, which felt like something.

During the race I watched a rider crash above a drop, then scramble back onto his bike in a hurry to keep going. He never fully got resituated before the next corner, and he hit the drop after it still frazzled, couldn't find a clean line. He thinks his tire may have gone flat in that first crash, though I never saw it. I only started shooting once he was airborne off the second drop. When I found him afterward his mouth was running a mile a minute, adrenaline still up, talking about how he'd been riding on emotion instead of focus, how he knew going in he wasn't in the right headspace but felt like he needed to be out there anyway, something going on at home. That's the kind of moment I'd usually want to sit with for a portrait. This time it didn't feel right to push into it.

Plenty of afternoons I'd find a patch of light landing just right on the trail and just wait. Wait for someone to come through, and the light wouldn't quite catch them. Wait for it to catch them, and they'd take the wrong line, off from where I needed the frame to balance. Three or four riders through and nobody in the right spot, or in the right spot but looking straight at the camera, or moving too slow, or with their body doing something that didn't read right. You learn to let most of it go and wait for the next one.

The end of the trip circled back to that same rider. I was showing people the crash photo afterward and he was standing right there while everyone oohed over it. Someone brought up his helmet, and he said he didn't see any cracks. We told him that doesn't always show up. He said it was a three or four hundred dollar helmet and he wasn't sure he wanted to replace it. We told him that three or four hundred dollars just saved his life. He hadn't decided by the time we all split up. It's a lot of money, and I get that. But once people start talking, they warm up fast, and that's the part I keep coming back for.

Also, if you're ever hiking through the woods in late July, watch out for Hickory Tussock caterpillars. Black and white, fuzzy, and no fun at all after one's spent the night under your shirt.

Race photos from Holimont are up on Pixieset.