Jul

19

BMX Bikes, from Jim Lackey

July 19, 2011 |

I still ride/race little kid BMX bikes. My buddies get a kick out of the fact I don't show up for 6 months and blow past them down the straits with all the jumps. I get a kick out of the kids. "You don't look that old"… On the feeling old front, it takes forever to recover after vigorous exercise. We must force ourselves to just ride. I got out almost every day and never feel like riding. Most days it's a lap around the neighborhood with the little ones. Once a month or so, hit it hard. You will feel great. If you hit it all too hard, feel sick, after an hour or so you feel awesome. I feel like a kid again.

On the roadie bike front, I have never been a roadie. My dad would not allow me to ride one of those "bikes with those stupid skinny tires that can get caught in a drain and you do a face plant".

Yet, road bike training is one of the best ways to train to race MX motorcycles. Try to ride a long duration with a high rollout gear on a BMX bike and you cant average more than 15MPH. A road bike you can really fly. The new breed of mountain bikes are awesome. They have the Urban series that is a BMX frame, Fox shocks so I can ride long distance and still ride down stairs and jump over anything. Nashville is a blast to ride downtown. I am going at 6am.

If you don't ride much or for a long time your butt needs to get into bike shape. Nothing gets more sore than your hind end. It takes 2 weeks. Also you do not use your hamstrings much or at all riding bikes. It's imperative to stretch them anyways. After B ball or a run you can always feel your tight hammys. After vigorous bike riding you can't. But your quads get stronger so there is a ying and yang. Stretch them our or your lower back will hurt like all hades. It's not your back!

FOOT DOWN is a great game to play in the drive with your kids to learn bike skillz. Mark off a box where if you leave, go over a line your out. We play drive way to drive way. You ride and try to make the other riders put their foot down. You're not allowed to touch or grab. It's not good for 5k road bikes in case some one does hit your wheel. I knock all the kids in the neighborhood out. I can pull in front of them stop, hold my brakes and still balance for a minute or I bunny hop out of a jam.

We can teach - 3 year old kids how to ride bikes. They can race at 4 and for sure by school age. For years we took the cranks and pedals off the cheap walmart 12" wheel bikes and let them scoot around. A few years ago our BMX buddy starting this company. Of course he has little show races about 30 yards on some part of the track and it's cute.

Kids don't ride bikes much anymore. I encourage every kid to ride a BMX bike or buy a MX trail bike if they are not interested in team sports. The biggest group of racers used to be 11-14 year olds. Now, not so much as both parents are forced to work and can't bring their kids to the races. Our biggest group of new racers is 5-8 year olds. That is the time where kids cant dribble, hit or catch a ball that great. Also that is about the time where mom has second child, a new baby in her arms as the little grommet is out there racing their new bike.

There is something to economic numbers/jobs and sport participation. I noticed the same thing in the 80's. It was a wicked recession back in the day and dad didnt work much and if he did it was out of town for a boiler repair job 4-6 weeks working 7/12's. So we never went with out. Yet once the economy picked back up the amount of racers attending the big races dropped off. I see that again now. People say, that is because the economy is so bad. I say, naaa it's because people are going back to work. They need to make some cake. Many men were out of work during the recession. Americans said, fine, screw it, I am going racing with my kids.

Now it's time to start to "get back ahead of the game" I hear that a lot lately, and it's an attention getter. Dad said that so many times. I can tell you one thing for sure. It's very difficult to be a sprinter after you hit around 40. In BMX racing we have Vet Pro and its 30. I complained for years it should be 35, best 37 and over. I see a few guys still in pro ball in their pate 30's. I didnt lose much sprint speed from 28 til 38, but I lost a ton of power at 39. Yet endurance sports can be played forever. My wife as most female runners do got better with age. All my X Motocross buddies are back racing. They had some vintage class the 50+ guys raced and my buddies started there. Glad I didnt fall back into that. They are all now on Brand new Honda's and Kawasaki's racing Nationals. Oh it's not that I can't or I am scared of injury. Perhaps that's a problem. Naa, the real problem is it's costly and I'd spend time away from my little girls. My son is Mr. highschool football and escaped the racing addictions. I'd hate to take my little girls (who do race BMX) to MX races and have them want to be a girl pro. Yes, now a days there are awesome young women that are professional MX racers. They are fast!

Check out Ashley Fiolek.


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1 Comment so far

  1. douglas roberts dimick on July 19, 2011 2:29 pm

    Whip It

    Jim, insightful article — thank you.

    Are you related to Brad?

    He was a favorite when I was racing a Honda 125 Elsinore in New England during junior high — hope to get back at it upon return from China.

    The BMX and MX connection is as intuitive as economic relative to scales of age and personal/family finance. We raced modified stingray bikes in our barn — actually welded a shock onto one back around 1972.

    The Rupp minibike was the next step-up, which led to a Yamaha 125 Enduro before the CR. Imagination and mechanics evolved during this phase of fun.

    Here is where your observation about kids not riding so much now appears convergent with the virtualization of our lives. Certainly, racing by pushing buttons or handling a joystick in front of a screen is a different kind of actualization compared to, for example, mastering one or more lines of a particular berm or timing a series of whoops.

    Although we can leave it to child psychologists, educators, and government so-and-so’s when theorizing what divergence shall twain from it all for current and future generations, we can be sure of one fact. There are always gonna be kids like Ashley out there who have the courage to follow their hearts while not forgetting their heads. Her parents must be proud of her.

    Alas, returning to the economics, if you so choose to launch from your article and try a double or triple, you might line up this vid (How the Middle Class Got Screwed) a la what happened to that discretionary income that allowed so many families to finance such youthful indulgences as motocross…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB7jdjsFErM

    I viewed the company bike link. Are the bikes made in the US?

    About a year ago, I was approached by a guy in Atlanta on a deal for financing of a salvage company. He had tons of Chinese made bikes imported and sold by stores like Wal-Mart — all junk, he said, which was how he ended up with them. The Chinese were buying the bikes back as scrap.

    That story got me thinking both about how weak we have become in a productive sense as a nation and also explains what happened to all that discretionary income. Free trade did not turn out to be fair trade — or was it a matter of buyers remorse?

    Ironic, the dominant motocross bikes for the past 4 decades hail from Japan…

    Happy trails…

    dr

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