Mountain Bike Drop-In Strategy

Have you ever gone to a skate park and noticed that the skateboard riders get to drop-in to the various ramps and jumps which have been designed into the skate park? These drop-ins allow the rider to gain speed and inertia to do all of their tricks. Often, there are BMX riders who also like to go to the skate parks and use the drop-ins for their own tricks. Perhaps you've seen the X-Games sponsored by Red Bull, and watched the BMX riders compete for who can do the best tricks. Many of them risk life and limb for the notoriety and for prize dollars.

If you go onto YouTube you will see there are mountain bike competitions for downhill, and for rather exotic trails, often modified with jumps and other features. It seems to me that having a drop-in strategy to allow these mountain bikes to get up to speed makes a lot of sense. It also means that smaller hills can serve the same purpose as larger mountains because the entry speed would be greatly increased. Now then, what I have in mind is a new concept, and I call it a BikeDrome. Why did I pick this name? Well because in ancient times there were Seadromes for warships, and at the beginning of the aviation era there were Airdromes, which today would be called simply; airports.

That sounds like a place to plug in your electric bike or some added feature on the bike to plug in your iPhone. It's not that either of those ideas are a bad concept, we need more of those too, perhaps even a WiFi mountain bike to text message, watch videos, and get your emails. Nevertheless, at some point it's time to stop doing all of the personal tech and start riding your bike not only to stay in shape, but also to show what you're made out of, to see if you can go the distance, and to see if you have the balls it takes to do the tricks without chickening out.

A BikeDrome would be a drop-in system which hooks on your back tire and tows you backwards up a near vertical wall you put your feet on the side in little trays which are slides. Once you are towed up to the top, you can press a release button and you slide down onto the trail or onto a ramp with a burst of speed. This would be the perfect system to get maximum speed before you start. That is if you are tough enough to handle it. Please consider all this and think on it.