Bash and Pop

Bash and Pop isn’t just the rock band Tommy Stinson put together after the Replacements broke up. It’s also a rudimentary technique for clearing obstacles on a bike on a trail, a technique that a lot of experienced riders employ so they can go fast, a technique you can have success with without having to learn the more nuanced methods of riding a bike on technical terrain.

It works just like it sounds, you approach an obstacle at max speed, more or less crash into it, and do your best to keep the front wheel moving forward.

I have been riding once a week with a friend new to mountain biking, and we talk a lot about technique. She’s a superior athlete, but you can’t just download years of on-trail experience, in the space of a few months, and my coaching, such as it is, has only taken her so far. Bash and pop, I tell her, is a perfectly acceptable way of finding your way forward.

Often she apologizes me for making me wait at trail crossings or after sections of technically challenging singletrack. I need no apologies, though. In fact, I am finding our slower pace through the woods is actually having an incredible and joyful effect on my own riding. I’m having a great time.

We are told, idiomatically, that there are a number of ways to (why are we doing this?) skin a cat, and the core concept here holds true on the trail as well, a continuum that runs from Tommy Stinson to Danny MacAskill, which is to say from Bash and Pop to the ne plus ultra of trials-heavy bike control. If you’re just trying to go fast, to drop or keep up with your friends, then Bash and Pop is a great way to achieve your goal. Plenty of “fast” mountain bikers never actually progress very much from this approach, which is fine. They value fast over smooth.

I value smooth, likely because even when bashing and popping at maximum heartrate, I’m still not very fast. Neither am I Danny Mac, Chris Akrigg or any of the other trials masters I so admire. But I aspire, oh how I aspire, and so slowing down has been a rewarding way to work on my technique. Trying to explain what I’m doing to someone who is both just starting out AND eager to learn, has amplified the pleasure of the process.

Any obstacle you want to conquer has a non-zero, minimum momentum at which it can be vanquished, and it likely takes more skill the closer you get to that minimum. At the same time, the component parts of the movement become easier to parse at lower speeds, and the reasons for failure become more clear too. I find this fascinating, and given the way we’ve been riding together, we are taking multiple opportunities to fail/try/fail/try/fail/try/succeed each outing.

It strikes me that bike riding, reduced to its constituent parts, is about two things, pedaling (i.e. power) and bike handling (i.e. finesse). My ability to power the bike comes and goes, and I for one don’t feel overly inclined to focus my attention on that aspect of the project. I just don’t find it very interesting or rewarding. Watts come. Watts go. I do find bike handling endlessly interesting though, the dynamic interaction of my body in space with the bike’s geometry and set up, pedal tension, terrain, etc.

Bash and Pop released two albums, one in 1993, one in 2017. The first one is better. Either one is nice to listen to while you make dinner or sit on the back porch. It’s pretty straightforward, melodic rock and roll. It’s effective without being emotionally complex or particularly rewarding. In other words, it has it’s time and place, but won’t be the most inspiring thing you listen to.