For the Brave and Daring (Part I)

My job as a Gameplan host is not to make every sport I do look easy. My co-hosts and I are athletic, but we surely don’t do everything with Shaun Palmer-like ease. I cramp. I stumble. I’m human. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I speak not for the elite athlete with Gatorade pumped veins and titanium buttocks. No! I represent the middle ground, the wannabes, the people who get picked last in gym class, the people who spend way too much time buying sporting gear and apparel and less on actual training. In other words, you.

Life is short and being a well-rounded athlete should go beyond one’s ability to run a treadmill or bench heavy weights at Slimmer’s. Now that it’s summer, is the indoor gym the place you really want to be?

Here are a few sporting alternatives you might want to try out this season. A few of them may appear a bit nutty, but life is meant to be a little crazy sometimes, right? All it takes is some initiative to try these challenging, entertaining and slightly insane sports.

Bike, bike, baby!

At some point in our lives, we’ve all riden a bicycle, who doesn’t remember his or her first bike ride? Didn’t it make you feel so, well, grown up? Dad rides a bike on two wheels! Now so do I!

With biking, you discover that the world extends way past the confines of your backyard. You learn that knee scrapes were the bane of every mother’s existence.

Mountain biking takes you back to all that. Thanks to technology, bike now bring you to place only dreamt of as a child. Up steep hills. Through sweeping fields. Across shallow streams.

Throw a leg over a mountain bike, head off to Tagaytay or Antipolo (or farther) and be a kid again. I guarantee you’ll love it. Mountain bikers refer to themselves a tribe, since there seems to be such a unifying bond between folks and the bicycles that take them away from the madness of the city. At the trail, expect to encounter the following:

CROSS-COUNTRY BIKERS – Cross-country biking is the first tribe. You can’t miss ‘em. They’re long distance lovers who take great pride in covering as much terrain as their legs can take them. Cross-country (a.k.a. XC) bikes have to be light for obvious reasons: the less load for your legs to push, the further you go. XC races are brutal endurance festivals that last for hours on end which chip away at the fittest athlete’s resolve, and makes a mere gram on a bike feel like a gallon by the day’s end.

DOWNHILLERS – Picture yourself hurtling downhill at a ludicrous speed, dodging ruts, rocks and roots all very capable of altering your weekend-rush ride into a paramedic’s worst case scenario. Downhilling (DH) poses as the polar opposite to XC. While XC racers tend to be geared in baggier, X-games type jerseys and shorts, with layers and layers of padding underneath. And while XC bikes are feather light, DH cycles tend to tip scales more at an anvil-like 30-40 pounds, which may be glute-bursting up a hill, but the extra weight provides stability. Heavier parts mean better protection.

FREERIDERS – It is the most Nike-commercial-sounding tribe of the bunch because it preaches you to be the biker you wish to be… at your own pace, style, and look. With this in mind, think versatility, a mix between an XC and DH bike. Not too heavy to allow the rider to pedal up hills, and too wussy-light either, to accommodate drops down small ravines, stairways, and the like. No parameters for free-riding, just go wherever you damn please.

(To be continued)