Narratives and Mountain Bike Trails

I regularly ride on a couple of mountain bike trails. One is in my woods on my property. The other is in a park that's about a mile from my house. The trail in my back yard is about 0.8 miles. The park trail is about 6 miles. I've ridden dozens of laps on the backyard trail and maybe 10 laps of the park trail.

One of the interesting things that happens with these trails is my brain "automatically" subdivides the trail into a collection of linked segments. I didn't sit down with a piece of paper and draw a map or really even think about it at all, but it's obvious after the fact that there are distinctly different sections all linked together.

There's obvious advantages to thinking about the trails like that. Generally each segment contains a specifically difficult challenge, like a steep hill, or a gnarly set of turns, a narrow bridge, or an obstacle of some kind. It's often helpful to be mentally prepared a second or two ahead of time to get positioned on the bike, or speed up, or slow down in advance.

Also there's an overall distinct "feel" of the section, which is how the sections come to be delineated in the first place, like going up a steep hill is just all out hard, or cruising down a gentle slope is fast and easy, but in that case it's necessary to be attentive to corners to not brake too much and maintain some speed.

Anyway, it's pretty common for the mountain bike sessions to feel like an adventure story. Typically it's about executing each section cleanly and as fast as possible. It's really easy to blow it and have to brake hard or go off a trail or even crash. It's self-rewarding to get through a turn at speed or to go blasting over a narrow wood path that's 30 feet long.

I don't do a similar mental segmentation of a road bike route at all. It often has distinct sections, but they're much longer in terms of both time and distance and generally the focus of the mind is on maintaining some level of effort, rather than trying to stay on the road.

It's fairly easy to see where "meaning" in a story comes from when looking at the MTB trail case. The narrative is associated with physicality on the MTB. The physical effort is similar to emotion in the instance of a story. A piece of music is similar, that is words or the overall flow of the music is linked with physicality through rhythm and the up and down of the pitch and maybe emotional content of the chords and words.