You crank it over into a turn, feel your front wheel slide, your heart skip a beat and then the wheel finds grip again. That was me on Friday night and it was great fun. Plenty of dry, fast trails punctuated with some reet clarty bits made for a great ride. I need to get out more whilst its like this. What does it for you?

similar to you, you know it’s a good un when you giggle to yourself coz you got away with one

charlie and page boys mostly.

also when you go over a drop that’s bigger than any you’ve done before, or stuff like that.

You land that 30ft gap sweet, which you’ve be looking at for a while. Yeh, the big drop thing is appropriate too. I felt like I was on top of the world when I did the 12ft ladder drop at my local freeride spot.

Speederbike tree dodging riding at full pelt. Whiskers away from clipping the surrounding arboreal hazards but you’re the boss and it all just flows. Also time skews, you’re riding fast but you feel oddly in control of the lack of control.

Nailing a jump/drop/gap feels good but it’s a shortlived feeling. Continuously pushing it is where the bigger buzz lies for me, or linking the above in a line.

Chasin’ a kom last week on an absolutely pissing wet, dark, stinking night, on my own, no spares with me, and riding way to fast for my own good, on an exposed moorland. That made me feel alive!.

…….You’re about to die.

I had a moment a bit like that riding near Rosslyn Chapel, saw something white in the trees out of the corner of my eye. Light was fading fast and I had no lights, didn’t ease up until I was at the back door at home. Al I was going to say it was bout time you came back out to mine but now I’m not so sure 😉

Hit some sort of rain channel made of slate-like stones set edgeways into the trail on a downhill in Spain on Thursday – proper face-on-the-wheel, balls-on-the-stem moment, how i rode that one out i’ll never know!
Was laughing to myself the rest of the way down 😆

…you take a deep breath and leap off the edge into the powder 6′ below. Land it, throw in some turns and ride out at the bottom, then stop and look back up at where you started, way back up there somewhere.

Your Proctologist continues to practice despite suffering from Parkinson’s.

Had a rear wheel lift-up on me a few rides ago whilst descending at pace and discovering a grass-covered rut. I seriously thought I was going to faceplant and only have the faintest recollection of how I managed to shift the weight back enough to drop the thing back down.

The old ticker skipped a bit, I can tell ya and I still have no idea of how the bloody thing raised-up in the first place.

The guy behind raved about it for the rest of the ride…

+1 for snowboarding on a good powder day, nothing beats the silence, the sun dancing rainbows in the crystals as they kiss your cheeks, you’re alone in the trees making fresh tracks in five foot powder then you burst into a clearing, a girl looks round a little lost, ‘hey G, isn’t this cool, wanna come and ride that bowl? We can hike that ridge and drop in over there….

…you’re in a road race break. There’s just a few of you, and you become one, hammering it out.

1st time I 360’d a road gap. wow, just wow.

was a while ago now but I still remember the adrenalin rush.

A car pulls out on you on a roundabout and your body does that full adrenalin dump as you struggle not to drop the bike / slam into the drivers door.

You’re flying down a loose rocky descent, over a drop off into a quick left right round a tree stump and your back wheel makes its best effort to overtake the front just as you put the power down to exit the turn. Followed by a woooah from your mate right behind you as he thought you (and in your own head too) were about to have a high speed face trail interface moment 🙂

Flying down a steep wide track with a right hand bend that you enter with too much speed, realise that you have quite a drop to your left. Hang on, ride it out, stop, hyperventilate, walk back and see your tyre track was 1″ from oblivion. Eeeek

Cave diving. Perfectly dark, perfect vision. No weight, utter focus. Just you, the light, the line. No room for fluff. No room for f@ckup.

Trying an unfamiliar bike/wheel size 😯 , doing a small drop @ speed, sliding into the under growth on mud, to find a hidden log angled just nicely to have you off , & piling over it, heart in my mouth. Owner seemingly only saw me slide back onto the track, thought nothing of it… 😀

just the now it is having run ten miles ridden Dalbeattie red then spent an afternoon in the pub with the other racers and now I, drinking port

I struggle with long sentences

Danger W**K

hmm.. I know the correct answer to this..

most of the answers here seem to involve frantic activity, which would almost certainly distract you from the business of actually feeling alive..

Somewhere between alan’s charlie/pageboy answer and the cave diving fella lies the truth but I’m not at liberty to discuss it further..

Mine is diving as well.
deep on trimix with great viz and the whole wreck to myself.
Mind you when the rebreather threw a 6 at 58m with lots of deco to do it was a less than ideal feeling.

SmartMonkey

over a crest in a trail and wheels barely on ground s the trail snakes left then a nice skip through the next right hander, rider behind laughing nervously as he’s done the same and knows how close it came to a mangled mess of bikes and blokes who should get out on the bike more often

As… When you finish a lead climbing pitch that for a while you thought you were going to fall off. I have had a few sketchey leads and the moment when I knew I was safe is burnt into my brain. Sitting at the top just feeling alive is the only way to describe it.

With Swearman on that one – just lead my first trad routes for quite a while. Popping an extra cam in then moving on up to a rounded top out….. still buzzing a few days later. Ended up leading E1 down in pembroke years ago looked down from the first proper bit of gear 20m up to see the blankness I had climbed.

Hitting something big on the bike does it but the consequence is lower normally.

You’re sitting on the starting grid on your Ducati. That is what does it for me. Makes the hairs on the back of neck stand up just thinking about it.

sweaman2 – Member
As… When you finish a lead climbing pitch that for a while you thought you were going to fall off. I have had a few sketchey leads and the moment when I knew I was safe is burnt into my brain. Sitting at the top just feeling alive is the only way to describe it.

Posted 3 hours ago # Report-Postmikewsmith – Member
With Swearman on that one – just lead my first trad routes for quite a while. Popping an extra cam in then moving on up to a rounded top out….. still buzzing a few days later. Ended up leading E1 down in pembroke years ago looked down from the first proper bit of gear 20m up to see the blankness I had climbed.

Hitting something big on the bike does it but the consequence is lower normally.

Can anyone translate ?

Almost dying but then not. Has happened to me a few times. Mostly involving drugs and fast motorbikes (only once at the same time though 😆 )

regaining a lost cause at the last moment, happened to me twice on my first ride of my new bike,

I loved it, made me laugh like a loon and feel very very alive!

Ice climbing on suspect ice, solo. Getting all the points to hold as you take the next axe placement. Getting it set, pulling and feeling it come towards you as you increase the load and move your feet.

For weeksy

climbing from the ground up placing protection as you go, so in effect there is a distance you an fall depending on where the last bit of protection was. Unlike biking where you stopping is an option when your up there sometimes us is the only option and if it goes wrong it really goes wrong 😮

When it goes right the buzz is amazing

This end of the rope game 🙂

This felt good,The summit of the Breithorn Ski touring above Zerrmat

Speed on narrow trails
That moment fraction of a second of silence when both wheels have left the ground.
Or two wheeled slides at any speed.

Snowboarding is a good one too, proper rapid so close to the ground specially on hard turns (don’t do drops, I iz boardin n00b)

most of the above tho are rightly summed up by rocketdog

you *just* got away with it

Appearing in court can be good (as lawyer!).

I wish I could say the same for selling £300 hybrids.

Has to be snowboarding steeps.

Proper steep, tight rock couloirs. All sorts of rocky nasties waiting to punish any mistakes, big exposure, knowing that any fall isn’t going to stop for a loooooooooooong time. Then nailing it. Awesumz.