Early in the process of writing Ballistic, I ran into the first wild bear of my life, mountain biking one morning. The story is in the video above, or in writing below:
I was riding my mountain bike and I was trying to catch up with my friends.
I'm going extra fast. And through the woods, there was a clearing and some sunlight over on the side. And there was a couple standing over there in their backyard. He was dressed for work and she was in her bathrobe. And they were waving their arms and yelling, maybe at me.
But I was kind of far away and there was some brush. And so I just pretended that they weren't yelling at me and kept pedaling.
And then I got closer, the path kind of opened up and then we're only like 50 yards apart and it was pretty clear they were yelling at me.
So I stopped and I yelled, what?
And then they both yelled back at the same time and it was very hard to make out any of the words until he stopped and she said her last two words, which hung in the air and made my hair stand on end, which were “young male.”
Which was interesting.
Just after she said that, it rose between us: a beautiful, young, apparently male, black bear. I'd never seen one in the wild before. I took a snapshot of its face in my memory, and you can perfectly see, it has like Rottweiler coloring and a dog-like mouth with those little pointy-up teeth. But on a bear, those pointy-up teeth point up so much more.
And he almost seemed like he was smiling. He was just kind of jogging right at me. Super chill. Just seemed calm and happy.
We're in New Jersey, which means it's almost certainly a black bear. And the playbook for that is to stand still, get big, act like you own the joint, be loud, and assume that the bear won't bother you.
I knew that's what I knew I should do. And that's not what I did.
Instead, I just got super chicken and I turned and I pedaled as fast as I could, like a little kid, running from a monster, which is basically what I felt like.
I've gone 55 miles an hour on a road bike before. And I had in my head that I know a bear can run twice as fast as Usain Bolt, but I was like, “I got a bike.” Maybe I can really get out of here.
But the trail happened to be kind of uphill and knotty, rooty, just not fast. And so I'm peddling my brains out and kind of have to be honest that I'm not going very fast. That's even before we got to the switchbacks where it's open. There are no trees or anything, but the trail winds back and forth and back and forth. And it's uphill, so you're going slower. And I'm pretty sure that if the bear just walked up the middle, if he missed me on the first pass, like, don't worry buddy, here I come.
I would circle back and you could just eat me then.
But I made it through the switchbacks and I made it to this little gravel parking lot where my friends were waiting on their bikes. And I blurted out my big bear news.
And then the bear appeared from the woods and ambled across the road a little lower down. Thankfully, instead of following me, he had been following the stream. And we finished our ride, the last like half hour of the ride going, “hey bear, hey bear, hey bear,” at every corner.
But what haunted me on the drive home was that I was writing a book about biomechanics. And I was pretty aware of like the feeling that I had, the shape of my body on the bike once I was terrified was almost fetal position, right? I just got real small and it made it hard to breathe and my heart rate was pounding and I was just stressed.
Meanwhile, the bear was walking around like a billionaire, like he owned the joint, right? He didn't have a care in the world.
And it struck me that this had not just been like a kind of alpha/beta thing. It had been a biomechanical thing. These things had biomechanical ramifications.
And that was kind of interesting. And it mattered a lot the second time I saw a bear.
Which is a story for next time.
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