Is mountain biking mostly mental?

Most sports claim their share of mental influence. The best example that comes up is golf; I can buy that argument and as a skier, I have gone as far as saying that skiing too, was around 80 to 90% mental. Today, I'm asserting the same value to mountain biking.

Yesterday was my first foray in my last unexplored segment of the Park City Mid-Mountain trail that connects Canyons Resort to the village of Pinebrook. So with a thirst for adventure and great eagerness for discovery I saddled my bike to make that trek. As I explained on a recent blog, knowing a trail well is essential for mountain biking fun, so when one ventures into unknown territory, there's a lot of apprehension going on.

When conditions are tough, when more concentration is required than usual, the brain and the rest of the body tires really fast and soon good judgment can be severely curtailed. For instance, I once got lost, making the wrong turn up into the mountain (I wanted to save my momentum, so I didn't stop to read the trail sign), at some other time, I was just scared for no good reasons by the huge drop below me. I missed also a bunch of tricky but not technically impossible hairpin turns; in other words, I was, at times, riding like a genuine begginer.

The end of the trail was no piece of cake either, as it ended up into private properties and with a map that wasn't that good, I had a hard time figuring where I should be going, resulting in more anxiety and more strain on my system. At the end of my ride, I was exhausted, even though I only covered less than 10 miles of single trail. This show how the mental side of the activity had drained all juice out of me!