(Photo: Jeff Kennedy)

I’ve been thinking about writing this for a while. I’ve always been fascinated by why people start riding bikes and what keeps them going. I woke up this morning and just felt inspired to write about how I got into BMX. Originally I was just going to leave it on Facebook but I have gotten a ton of feedback so I decided to put it on here. Check it after the jump.

Most of my friends have spent a very large percentage of their lives riding BMX bikes. We spend hours and hours discussing the intricacies of BMX. What tricks we like, what tricks we’ve done, what tricks we hate, what tricks we want to someday do, what videos we like, what videos we hate, where BMX has taken us, really anything even slightly interesting will end up getting discussed ad nauseum at some point. But one thing we rarely discuss is why we ride.

A very common question in interviews is “how did you start riding?” and the answer is always something like “we built some piles of dirt in our back yard and started seeing how far we could jump” or “I started off learning to wheelie down the street and it just kind of went from there”. HOW we started riding is the wrong question. WHY we started riding is what matters.

I’m 28. I haven’t been 13 in a very long time, but I remember it clearly because I think that it was probably the worst age I’ve ever lived through, for quite a few reasons.

When you’re around 13 you start going through puberty. Remember puberty? All of a sudden you’ve got hair sprouting up everywhere, your desire to have sex with girls increases tenfold and while previously I was mostly interested in drawing, video games and comic books, all of a sudden I was listening to Nirvana all the time. I was obsessed with rap music all through elementary school but by the time I hit 13, Kurt Cobain and Marilyn Manson really represented how I felt better at least for a few years. I was also hanging out with my friends smoking cigarettes, fighting and spending 90% of my waking hours plotting on how I was going to convince girls at school to make out with me. I was a 13 year old mess of emotions, experiencing a surge of testosterone I had never felt before and would never feel again.

All of a sudden comic books and video games didn’t hold my attention anymore. I wanted to shoplift. I wanted to sneak out of the house at night with my friends and throw eggs at people’s houses. I wanted to bring girls out into the woods and finger them behind the bushes. I didn’t fully understand why I wanted to do those things, I just knew I wanted to.

When I was in elementary school I had a couple of good friends named Aaron and Brandon. We were, without question, the most poorly behaved kids in school. Brandon lived on the other side of town and he was white trash. He was fucking hilarious and a total bad ass but he lived in a trailer park and he was always wearing really dirty jeans. Aaron had just moved to Nashua from Lowell to live with his aunt. His mother had died of AIDS. He was bigger than almost everyone else in school and he had a real mean streak, all he wanted to do was fight and he knew that he was tougher than everyone else in school. He was the angriest person I had ever met. I loved him.

They both had BMX bikes and one day they rode over to my house and picked me up. I was riding this ratty old road bike. We rode into downtown Nashua and rode down this long dirt trail and I was shocked to find the first set of dirt jumps I had ever seen. I remember them being gigantic. I’m sure if I went there now they’d seem tiny, but at the time I was blown away. I couldn’t even wrap my head around the fact that BMXers had built these things and I actually asked Brandon and Aaron if the city built them. They made fun of me for asking such a stupid question. I felt dumb.

The other thing that impressed me was their bike set ups. They both rode tiny cut down S&M Castillo bars, they had their seats pointing straight up at absurd angles and they both rode 2 pegs. Oh and they had no brakes. The utilitarian nature of this set up fascinated me. They had 2 pegs, they said, because they only grinded on one side. They cut their bars down because it made it easier to do barspins (which, at the time in our circle were performed exclusively by leaning back and letting them fly) and they rode no brakes because their wheels were always bent. There were rules in my head about how a bicycle was supposed to work and these guys had no regard for those rules. I have always liked people who prized logic and efficiency more than tradition.

Aaron convinced me to ditch my old bike and get a BMX bike by writing “get a BMX, mountain bikes are for fags” in my 6th grade yearbook. I had a paper route at the time but I didn’t have the money so I convinced my dad to let me borrow 200 dollars to get a Schwinn Powermatic complete from the bike shop downtown and pay him back in installments. I loved that thing, even though within a couple months I realized I needed to upgrade. The cool kids all rode S&M Next Generations and STA’s and the goofy looking bent tubing on my Schwinn really stood out like a sore thumb, but I didn’t have any money so I endured the teasing and rode that weird looking Schwinn for years. I took my brakes off the day I got it. My mom didn’t understand why all my shoes had holes in them all of a sudden.

By this point though, Aaron and Brandon were already becoming really interested in drinking and smoking while I was singularly obsessed with bikes. I needed new people to ride with. I knew there were older dudes that would meet up to ride at the bike shop downtown on Friday nights. I didn’t know any of them by name but I rode down there and hung out, just dying to be accepted. I don’t think I could even 180 yet. I was 14.

Of course, I wasn’t accepted. These dudes were all older than me, they all knew how to do all kinds of tricks and they all thought it was pretty hilarious that I wanted to be down. They let me ride around with them but they teased me all the time. I just didn’t really know how to fit in. I wore shirts from weird bands (it was only a year or two later but I was already too cool for Nirvana and had moved on to local punk and ska bands) and rolled my pant leg up so it wouldn’t get stuck in my chain. I was clueless. I could kind of tell that they liked me though, despite all the teasing and I knew that if I kept hanging out, I would keep getting better at riding, better at dealing with the teasing and that eventually we would just be friends. And you know what, I was right. Some of those guys are still some of the best friends I’ve ever had.

We would stay out until 3 or 4 in the morning some nights. When I was 14, staying out until 4 in the morning felt insane. Who rides their bike around that late? Even at 14 I was watching BMX videos and dreaming about what it would be like to ride all night in far away places like New York. Until I was old enough to do that, I would just stay out as late as I could. I was stuck in my shitty town but I just wanted to experience life. My bike represented freedom to me. I could take off into the night and all of a sudden I would be 10 or 15 miles away from home. It gave me a sense of freedom I had never felt before.

We would do a lot more than just work on tricks back then. We were living off the land. We knew girls who worked at pizza places and fast food establishments downtown so we’d wait for them after work or go in when they weren’t busy and get free food. We were broke, so spending a couple dollars on food seemed silly. If we couldn’t scheme our way into some free food we’d go to the grocery store and steal some candy or something. We knew about a broken door behind this movie theater so we’d pedal there, hide our bikes in the woods, sneak in and watch movies for free. I didn’t even really like movies, but I was having the time of my life.

I had people to ride with, but I still rode alone all the time because I wanted to get better at riding and I knew I needed to put in time to do so. I would put in hours and hours of riding every day after school. When it snowed, I would try barspins and kickflips in my garage. In 10th grade I was riding a flat ledge by myself and I pulled a feeble to kickflip and a feeble to half barspin in the same day. I went to school the next day and told my friend Jared. He thought I was lying. He told me only pro’s did kickflips. The fact that he didn’t believe me made me even happier.

Despite the occasional success story, you know how some people are naturals at riding? I’m the opposite of that. It took me a year of trying to learn to bunnyhop. I played sports when I was a kid but only because my parents made me. I wanted to be able to manual more than anything, so I would pick some cracks in the ground outside my house and just spend hours trying to get from one to the other. I still remember the day I figured it out and all of a sudden it felt like I could manual a few blocks if I had to. Learning to manual was an intense experience for me, because it was the first time I had ever picked a skill I wanted to learn, worked hard at it and accomplished it. It gave me a confidence boost that I really needed and I quickly started to apply the same logic to other things. In 11th grade there was a girl named Charity in my first period class. She was gorgeous. If you had asked me at the time I would have swore she was the most beautiful girl on earth. She was way too hot for me. The fact that I was even entertaining the idea of seducing her was shocking, both to her and to my friends. I asked her to hang out on Halloween and she obliged. I went over her house and we lit incense and listened to her Bob Marley and Grateful Dead CD’s. She told me a couple of days later that she only liked me as a friend. I persisted. She made me wait till New Years to kiss her. I was her first kiss. It felt exactly like learning to manual.

Here’s why I rode then:

I wanted to be good at something. When you’re 13, this isn’t easy. What were you good at when you were 13? I wasn’t good at anything. I had played sports and I sucked. I wanted girls to like me, but that proved challenging. I didn’t have the attention span to do well in school. I wasn’t very good at riding bikes either but at least the ball was in my court. I sat outside my house for hours trying to 180 until I finally pulled one. Then I kept practicing until I could do them consistently. 7 years later I pulled a clean hop 3. I knew very early on that I wasn’t going to be a pro (I didn’t even really understand the concept of being a pro) and it wasn’t like I ever thought I was going to gain anything material from riding, I just knew that I was having a good time working on it. BMX showed me how to be good at something.

I wanted to belong. When I was in 10th grade the older riders had already kind of accepted me but I didn’t really know to what extent we were friends. I had beef with this kid Kevin. His brother was into my girlfriend and I threatened him. He wanted to fight me after school. I was stressing it. He was bigger than me and I knew I was going to lose. My friend Cory (he was a senior and one of the best riders in school) knew about it and he asked me about it towards the end of the day when I saw him in the hall. I said I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to fight. I was scared. Cory told me he would go with me and that I had to fight Kevin, but that if I was losing he’d jump in and take care of it for me. I didn’t even know what to say. I had never had anyone show me that kind of loyalty before. Cory didn’t even really know me that well, but I was a BMXer and he was going to look out for me. I had never felt that kind of love before. My parents loved me, but my dad wasn’t going to jump someone on my behalf. I still think about that day all the time and I always try to let me younger friends know that I’m there for them and will protect them.

(Incidentally, like is often the case when it comes to high school fights, it never materialized into anything. 10 years later, I still ride BMX every day, and Kevin is a meth head.)

I needed an escape. My dad went to prison for a year when I was 12 and my Mom was losing her mind trying to keep her family from falling apart while he was locked up. I was so angry at the government for taking my father from me. I didn’t want to be at home because there was so much stress and hostility in the air. Even once my dad got back, he was a different person in some ways. He was constantly pissed off at me for not doing well in school, fighting and getting suspended. He’d fly off the handle and beat me for no good reason. I had to get out of there, so I got on my bike and I hung out with my friends all night. BMX saved me

Sometimes I hear people talking about how BMX has changed, how the kids all just want to get paid and show off and learn crazy tricks to get attention. Usually the people who say those kinds of things are pretty young themselves and probably projecting their own insecurities. To me, BMX is still the same. I still get the same things out of BMX that I did when I was a kid. I still get the same amazing feeling inside when I learn something new, no matter how minor it is. I still love seeing one of my friends pull an awesome trick more than anything on earth.

I still want to belong. Sure, back then I was a kid trying to fit in with the locals and now I’m a grown man managing a crew of pro’s, but I still feel that same sense of pride from being a part of something. The difference is that when I was 14 I was using my bike as a tool to experience life. Now we make videos to show the world what our vision of BMX is. Every time a kid hits me up and tells me that they love a video I had a hand in making, I know I’m doing a good job.

BMX is still my escape. When I was 14, BMX helped me explore the town I grew up in. Last month I was riding around in Beijing. It felt the same. I was pedaling around with my friends laughing and observing the world around me on my bike. I don’t think I’m ever going to get over that.