mountain bike | Free State of Jen

I got a new bike: Pivot Les Fat. According to the the dudes who sold it to me, it’s the only one of its kind in Australia. It’s a nice bike, that’s for sure, but it’s heaps different to ride compared to Fatty, my Icon Fat Albert, so it’s going to take a bit of getting used to. For example, it almost got away on me down a massive hill last night! It didn’t help that it was dark and I could only see as far as the headlight beam spread: not far at all. Normally down that hill, I don’t have any problems with Fatty taking off on me because Fatty is slow, heavy, chunky and cheap! The Pivot is none of these things at all, especially the cheap part.

The cool guy I’m married to decided he needed to get himself a new bike X 2 so he could join in on bike adventures. While I waited for the Pivot to arrive from America, Fatty broke (I bent the derailleur and the brakes stopped working. I don’t think these cheap bikes are designed to cope with being ridden the way I’ve been riding poor Fatty), so I rode the Cool Guy’s new Norco Bigfoot 3, which he got upgraded with hydraulic brakes, Renthal bars, and Bluetooth seat dropper. I was able to swap out the shitty brakes on Fatty with the original Norco brakes. I feel a weird attachment to Fatty and feel kind of guilty that I’ve gotten a new bike and have been riding a Norco in the interim. Sorry Fatty, I still love you!

I took the BF on some adventures recently. I’d always wanted to ride along the side of the highway down to the Isis River, which was just a couple of puddles when I was there. This is just south of Childers.

BF at the Isis River, just under the bridge (Bruce Highway)

The same day I found a cool track in the bush and came across this hippy lady living out of her van. She was set up on a bush track in the middle of nowhere. There were plants growing out of the van and her tow vehicle. She was really happy and friendly and gave me permission to take a photo of her rig.

Hippy lady’s van in the middle of nowhere.

The BF and I went on a little trip to Toowoomba together a couple of weekends ago and we rode the trails at Gordonbrook just outside of Kingaroy and Russell Park at the Bunya Mountains.

BF on one of the trails at Russell Park.

I had a good buster at the Bunya Mountains. I didn’t get a corner right at the bottom of a hill and somehow fell off and got trapped in the bike frame because the handle bars had flipped around the wrong way. So, I sat there for about a minute trapped in the frame, trying to work my way out. I wasn’t particularly impressed, but got some awesome bruises that I was able to show off the following week at work. I was very glad that no one else was there to see how ridiculous I must’ve looked!

On the same trip I was able to go exploring and found this secret rail trail:

Secret rail trail. It’s not open to the public and I only found it because the little voice inside my head kept telling me to “just” go have a look around the corner, and another corner and another, until I found it. I was on foot, which was difficult enough. I’m not sure how you’d even get a bike on the trail. I love finding secrets in the bush. That’s what being adventurous is really all about.

In a little country town outside of Toowoomba I saw this awesome bike:

The BF and I also rode a fair bit at the local tracks at Cordalba. This guy didn’t make it:

I found this busted-arse car when I bush bashed my way through a secret track that caught my eye.

So, we have quite a bike family now:

Pivot Les Fat, Norco BF3, Specialised something or other (it’s got skinny wheels, so it’s not a real bike), Icon Fat Albert (Fatty). In the background is my awesome 4WD van, The Nonce.

I recently got a fat bike themed number plate for The Nonce. This is the caption:

I felt like was extremely clever coming up with this! No one else is likely to understand it, but I reckon it’s hilarious!

I really love being a fat chick because fat is where it’s at

Sometimes people tell me I’m skinny. I don’t think I am, I’m just really fit, so I have a fair bit of muscle and not much body fat. This doesn’t happen by accident because I train pretty hard, which is why I don’t really like getting told that I’m skinny. I just think that people aren’t generally used to seeing women who are my age and look like I do.

When I was a kid, I was teased for being fat. I don’t even know if I was. I do know that I was taller than everyone else in my classes all the way through primary school. It wasn’t until around grade nine or ten did the boys start to overtake me in height, and even then, there were only about four of them. Mr Fell, who was a teacher at my primary school in Hervey Bay whispered in my ear one day, “Jenny needs to go to Jenny Craig” What kind of an arsehole says something like that to a kid?! Ugh.

Me and Fatty have started hanging out a fair bit lately. This is Fatty in his natural habitat. Taken on the latest secret track I discovered in Woodgate:

I found a secret track on Google Earth a while back, so yesterday I set out with a hand drawn map (I don’t have an internet phone) to see if I could follow it:

I rode for two hours, mostly through deep sand along the secret track and back home again. It would’ve been around 30km. It was a really hard ride, but still, it was awesome, and this time I didn’t fall off, although I came close a couple of times. See, the bike needs to go forward when I’m on it, which is the whole concept behind cycling, and if I don’t have enough momentum when I hit a deep patch of sand, then over I go. It all happens in slow motion and is quite painless due to the soft landing. Getting the sand out of my shoes, and last time out of my hair and ear, is another story, especially when I’m all sweaty.

I fell off once due to a spider’s web. I’m really scared of spiders and I rode down yet another secret track and went face-first into a spider web. All I could think of was having a giant spindly-legged beast on my face or on my helmet and I screamed (even though I’m a girl, I rarely do this and my screams sound nothing like you’d imagine a girly scream to sound) and jumped off the bike mid pedal, it stopped going forward and promptly fell on my leg. Fatty is heavier than a regular mountain bike (due to his obese wheels I’d say). This was about three weeks ago and I still have the bruise. There was no spider. This is how big a spider is:

But this is how big it feels to me, even if its non existent:

I looped around back to a track I’ve ridden down multiple times and Fatty said he wanted a rest, so he posed for a photo here:

I love Fatty, but it wasn’t always like that. And the thing is, he doesn’t even belong to me. He belongs to the cool guy I’m married to. When the cool guy bought this bike I told him he was being ridiculous. “It’s a stupid fad these fat bikes. We’ve already got bikes, why do you need one like this? It’s ridiculous, look how big the wheels are!” It’s pretty funny now that I’m the one who rides Fatty all the time and am always going on and on about how great it is to have a bike that can do the things that Fatty can do. There’s no way in hell I’d ever be able to ride a regular mountain bike in the places I take Fatty, and there’s no way I’d ever be able to make a regular mountain bike go as fast as I can get Fatty to go. On Fatty I feel like I’m invincible. I didn’t like Fatty in the beginning and sometimes it’s good to be wrong about things. Mr Fell was wrong about me too, when he believed I was worthless, and I was wrong about myself for a long time believing that I was fat, ugly and nonathletic.

Be wrong and see where it can take you