The Pinkbike Podcast: Episode 126 - "One More Run" and Other MTB Superstitions

 airquotes "second last run" is standard practice in my family. boarding or bikeparking, it's the rule.

 @xy9ine: yeah same for me and my buddies. Last run is cursed. Too many times one wants to really send it one last time that day and then ends up crashing. Better stop after the second last run

 “Two more, skip the last” is a classic. I personally always just say “another”. Another is open ended, could be one more, could be 5. Strangely similar to how I speak with bar tenders…

 My pre ride ritual is where I tell the wife it’s only a few hours ride. “I’ll be back by 2pm”………….

When I return home at 5pm the gods always wish me luck……..

 @bashhard: some of the biggest/serious crashes happened to me on the last runs of the respective days.

even 4 days ago.. taking it slowly back to speed during the day, arriving at a point where I fel I was riding good.. did that for a couple of runs then decided to call it a day and do only one more run. 100m into trail I lost the front and hit/scratched/cut my shoulder a bit. 200m after I slipped of a rock and went sideways.. then, 300m before the trail end, I took toooo much speed on a vertical wich ended with a drop that goes to flat in less than 1 meter and the bike slingshot from me, straightening my arms making not possible to turn into the berm, actually using the berm as a ramp and took of into the forrest...; lucky me, I landed onto some small pine trees that acted as a safety net. I never seem to learn that when we call for the last run, I should not go up again. 2 broken helmets, wrist, nose, multiple bruises... all of them on my last runs yet, I still pretend(believe) it is just a coincidence.

 Agreed we need to keep pushing to make long-form, quality stuff, regardless of if it's on paper or pixels.

As for the XC/XXC we missed a bit of tech this week but we've had a decent number of stories in the run-up. For example:
www.pinkbike.com/news/pinkbike-primer-will-we-see-a-fouth-win-from-mcconnell-at-the-fourth-round-leogang-xc-world-cup-2022.html
www.pinkbike.com/news/pauline-ferrand-prevot-will-not-be-racing-the-leogang-xc-world-cup.html
www.pinkbike.com/news/evie-richards-to-miss-leogang-world-cup-xc-to-focus-on-back-rehab.html
www.pinkbike.com/news/start-list-who-will-be-racing-in-the-leogang-xcc-short-track-world-cup.html

 Freehub is a good quarterly, Mountainflyer is pretty good too

 @sjma: Agreed, Brice does a great job.

 @brianpark: Thank you. I'm blind!

 I don't care about the print edition, but I am sad for the staff. Ryan Palmer et al were a great addition, especially on the podcast. Also the writing on online Beta was enjoyable, even though always a bit too short.

PS: One of the main reasons why I paid for Beta is to support the Pinkbike DH Team. I do not regret that and that money is not lost.

 Yeah, I subscribe to Freehub and I love it. No discussion of gear at all, which I usually love and mostly what I read online, so you just get that mountain biking stoke; no overtone of requiring they next best thing to have fun. They also do a great job of covering material from all over the country in all its flavors. Finally, the pictures and print quality are beautiful and even you don't care about biking, it is wonderful to look at. I highly suggest you get a subscription.

 @sjma: Full support on the Freehub mag referral. BikeMag was great too and maybe PB staff can't talk about this now but...is Palmer gonna be on PB or is he just nuked? Someone said he was cut from Beta and if so he's probably feeling pretty Zeta about that - someone get that man a job.

 I think a poll on what media pinkbike users actaully view/read, what they like currently, and what they want the future to bring could actually be useful here, for everyone really.

Plus it might just blow the minds of the conspiricy theorists on here that pinkbike poll data might actaully be valuable to serving an audience and making money

 @mtb-journal: Agreed, I liked Palmer and his writing, plus he was good on the podcast. A few of the other bits were dead interesting too, @mikelevy s article on radio tower rides really struck a chord for some reason

 @Sambikes11: Musta missed that article - ya got a link to it? Trying to search for it in the meantime...

 @mtb-journal: palmer was great. Has he lost his job then? Now room for any beta staff at PB @brianpark? Sorry if it says this on the podcast, I will listen but I'm currently in a queue at a bar getting a beer. Priorities.

 Dammit Palmer was a great addition to the team, super knowledgeable, and I liked hearing his perspectives. I can hear its hard for Brian to talk about it. I can understand that companies change etc. But Robin came on talking big talk about how they are going to grow the PB community and provide funding, and support and then they turn around and show they aren't even going to take care of their own. Sorry to hear it PB crew, I'm sure its not easy for you guys to feel that pressure as well, seems like a clear show of priorities from Outside. It's hard to not feel like the community is at some point going to need to step in to save PB from Outside.

 @everythingscomingupmilhouse: We were able to move Satchel over to the video team but the others were laid off. Definitely disappointing.

@misteraustin: Agreed, Palmer is great and I'm sure we'll work with him again in the future.

 @Mtn-Goat-13: www.betamtb.com/culture/the-lasting-allure-of-radio-tower-rides

 @brianpark: thanks for the reply. I really appreciate you taking the time to humour us and engage with us, and I value what you do. I do really think that you and all the PB team are good eggs. I hope outside never treat you like they did beta.

Such a shame to see the way beta have been treated, they all seem like great people. If any of them read these comments I hope they know that what they did was appreciated.

Robin and his cronies on the other hand, what a two faced lying weasel, a pathetic excuse for a human being. It really speaks a lot about a person when they talk the talk initially and then treat people like that. Outside will be getting exactly zero of my dollars and pounds from here on out. f*ck you Robin. It's also totally out of order that you got Brian and the PB crew to talk about how this take over would be good for us and sell it to us, all the while planning this crap. Remember the work Brian did to get beta mag shipped overseas to subscribers? You've made them look like total mugs.

And for what it's worth, written articles and podcasts are the media I want, if I wanted videos I'd be on YouTube or watching TV. If video is the future that outside want, I will not be there with you whether it's free content or not.

I feel like outside is finally showing it's hand, and it's the crappy one we were all worried about. It won't stop here, PB will look very different in a few years.

Again, f*ck you Robin.

 This sucks. I just went on vacation, spending plenty of time in the airports and planes and I had two print copies of Beta with me to look at. Taking the time to appreciate the photos and well written articles is a different experience to the endless scrolling online. I left them in the different airplanes for later passengers to enjoy, but now I'm wishing I still had them.

 I bought a Beta membership because I understood it would help create interesting articles and support good things like the PB DH team with Cathro. Beta may be gone, but the reason I got a membership wasn't really for the beta site (though I was pretty excited about having a magazine show up in the mail like it was 1999) - it was to support awesome stuff.
I don't need a refund on anything if I can be assured the money is going into PB Racing or some other wholesomely good project. If it is tossed into Outside's general revenue - ahhhhh, man, I may want a refund

 @GFozzz: Got some bad news, they'll never actually touch on this, and you can guarantee it is.

 @everythingscomingupmilhouse:


Your comment perfectly encapsulates what I want from PB:

@brianpark: “And for what it's worth, written articles and podcasts are the media I want, if I wanted videos I'd be on YouTube or watching TV. If video is the future that Outside want, I will not be there with you whether it's free content or not.”

 @brianpark:
So are outside + members still going to get what listed when we signed up?

 Pretty funny that paywalls appears so we pay for the premium service and then the service is scrapped. I feel bad for pb and beta staff but I won’t be paying for any further services after this poor level of delivery. Talk about loss of consumer confidence and brand loyalty. I regularly contribute to Trailforks to help build our community but now really can’t be bothered.

 @Garradmiller: I dunno, I went outside+ to support Beta and have access to paywall content. So far outside+ has given me jack.

 @dmackyaheard: same here, pretty disappointing

 This is so true, only time I crash mountain biking is when I go mountain biking.

 Agreed and disagreed: there are easily ways to print on recycled / non-tree fibers - we've had access to that for decades but the paper industry disapproves. But all print is just about "news" or events that just happened. Much of it is timeless - the recent Freehub articles about Alexandra Houchin's distance riding and her native American culture - haven't seen a single online article about that anywhere (maybe its there though); or how Angelo Washington found MTB or the Vermont issue (pure gold) are good mtb journalism and for me, priceless print treasures I don't have to get online to read...things I can unwind with vs. starting a screen flashing 60 times as second. Yeah, it ain't Shakespeare or Dickens but if we're not wanting paper then we also have to add books to that list.

Print is also tactile & you can literally hold in your hand, read without batteries & power whenever you want. Doesn't always require electricity & light to have to read - or what when hackers take down the history of the internet (I'm exaggerating but anything is possible). I get it though - online is all just where the money is as the internet grows - things change so for me this makes print all the more valuable.

Still - I effin' HATE forests going down for paper & butt wipes, its a pathetic outdated waste of not just a resource, but THE source - nature and vast complex ecosystems. But freehub - mtb print is baller. The recent Ep1 pub from Downtime Podcast and Misspent Summers is unreal - totally not onlne... timeless, and I've read some of those articles 5-10 times. But just like digital - not all of it is classic or much more than a glance - and bike ads are kinda funny to see later but even then the snapshot in time on paper is a riot.

Its a conundrum, but in a sense - the lack of paper pubs makes the existing ones even more precious to some us - I'll pay out the nose for them. In fact I just sold a few years worth of mint-cond Thrasher & Transworld skate mags from the 80's & early 90's for $500 a set - so yeah, there's some $$ in it.

 @Mtn-Goat-13: Maybe the articles you’re writing about here were not online, but they just as easily could have been. Want something for tactile? Print it out. That recycled paper is nowhere near the quality of the good, glossy stuff.

Everything you said all comes down to the emotional and sentimental. From a practical purpose, there’s no real reason for any of it, and from a corporation looking at a bottom line, they see the cost of printing and postage, and it’s easy to cut. Especially when the demand is dwindling. That’s just the reality.

 @TheR: Heard on all that - no expectations here that print is suddenly gonna boom - but I don't print things anymore so - done w/ that. If paper is emotional / sentimental - then so is the same content on a screen...so are laptops & phones. But to be sure there's nothing wrong w/ emotional / sentimental (just superstitious) and in light of that comment or idea - that means books & even artwork and the mail are too - so lets just get rid of those while we're at it - especially since they aren't direct advertising media like PB or other content makers are (and yes I'm being facetious)...just following the logic.

Anyway I'm part of the digital demand - I like it & its prob 90% of what I view, but I also support Freehub and so do many other 10's of 1000's of riders so that's floating quite nicely - I pay well for it. I'd pay 4-5 or even 10x as much for it b/c living w/o emotions or sentiment, for me, doesn't have market value.

 @Mtn-Goat-13: great call on Downtime EP1! I've really enjoyed flipping through that.

 @brianpark: New issue literally being shipped now…

 @Mtn-Goat-13: The Radavist are doing a good job reporting on Alexandra Houchin.
theradavist.com/?s=houchin

 Yes, I decided not to be superstitious and it was such a relief not to worry about stuff that realistically didn’t matter.

 At Whistler you get an extra run if you do one last run to check the trails for injured riders. I consider it a good karma run to protect me in future last runs.

 @DoubleCrownAddict: I volunteered for a sweep run ( skiing) and frankly couldn’t enjoy it because I had to focus on finding hurt skiers.

 that exact thing was bothering me as well. Screamed thats a perfect game to myself in the car

 Marketing budgets aren't generally very big in the bike industry. Unless you're hiring movie stars I don't think most video budgets have significant impacts on a shop floor price.

That said, I agree it's hard to keep up. I would like to see less and better projects from bike brands. I think we'll probably post fewer of them in the future (or maybe just on slow weekends). I hate to see filmed-in-a-day low effort edits pushing bigger, better projects down the page.

 Wade Boggs hit a career 0.328! Chicken FTW

 Except that varies around the globe and in fact, most non-domestic / wild people do not at all have "beliefs" in the way we think they do about the wildlife around them because 1) much of original people's language & thought simply cannot & does not translate directly into our modern ideas - we are basically aliens in wild places while they live in them easily and 2) they often don't hunt or even interact with much of the wildlife around them or even think of them as 'species' like we do with science. A raven has food in its mouth because its stashing it, feeding its young or itself - not because you're in a car below it...that crow realistically sees you as a predator to avoid. These things have lives and thoughts we largely can't understand and I can promise you this having studied wildlife / ecology / science for decades - if wildlife were superstitious and illogical - they die. They wouldn't even exist because idealogy would overule instinct. Instict = the opposite of extinct.

So yeah, can say you saw a deer or a dove & were filled with innocence or a bear or jaguar and were filled with courage (whatever) - but that actually has zero to do with their lives, their thoughts & ways of being and honestly - its not even recognizing the behavior (or lack of) the animal is even exhibiting which if you're watching - is far more interesting than attributing "beliefs" or emotions to. I'm not even saying yr dumb or wasting yr time, but just to consider that not everything - and in fact the majority of everything - does not at all relate to what humans think. We are just stroking our egos with this type of thought. I'll be the first to say I use to think like this all the time - it's enitrely Polyanna and idealistic.

 @Mtn-Goat-13: cool dude, I read a book once and liked it enough to add concepts it to my imagination. Sorry to ruffle some of your beliefs!

 release the unedited cross country field test!

 Come on! Do you think I'm a gullibull? Or even a gullicalf!?

 I’m not superstitious but I am a little stitous.

 Ah cool, I'll check it out.