I’ve never told this to anyone before. Not my wife. Not my shrink. Not my buddies on boys’ night out, over beers. Of all the browser-clearing, red-faced-making small-screen streaming habits, there’s one hyperspecific genre I admit turning to while sitting at my desk and feeling anxious and forlorn when it’s time to write. I have, for quite a stretch, been feeding on first-person, helmet-cam-P.O.V. extreme-mountain-biking videos. I use them as a sort of homeopathic Adderall. They fire up my nervous system; they exhilarate and terrify.

I watch and rewatch clips like the low-definition “Inches from Death: Downhill mountain biker rips cliffs in Utah.” This is an underappreciated classic of the form, with fewer than three million views (half of them mine), and may be more geared toward the connoisseur. If you’re looking for a well-produced entrée that asks only two minutes of your time, there’s Kelly McGarry’s “Backflip Over 72ft Canyon,” which has almost thirty-five million views, and whose title doubles as an excellent name for an Ansel Adams landscape.

There’s no heavy-metal track added to either video to generate extra tension where it’s not needed. There are no crazy jump cuts meant to do the same. Once the ride starts, it’s just you, inhabiting someone else’s noggin, running the trail. And what those trails look like are gray ribbons, unfurling at great heights, as if the world were a giant, crested camel’s back that—staring out over the handlebars—you’re about to race along. The only sounds are the wind whipping past, and the biker’s labored breathing. Ideally, there’s no dialogue, other than “Awesome!” when something awesome has been achieved.

Watching these videos is also an efficient way to commune with nature, if nature had a Red Bull logo posted every hundred yards. Even a stunt like McGarry’s backflip has a scrubby desert feel, if you ignore the part where he plunges toward, and launches from, a man-made ramp jutting beyond the cliff’s edge. Once he takes off, the rotation is disorientingly wonderful, as a perfect blue sky passes beneath, before the earth rights itself and the tire treads grab.

I will, occasionally, make an exception and click on a slick, multi-camera, bass-thumping clip like “If Only Every Mountain Biking Video Was Shot Like This,” if the riders featured are having the kind of out-of-body fun that I’m after.

The out-of-body part is what’s central to the draw. The liquid grace as a cyclist picks a treacherous line to follow, and then just flies. It’s that element—the at-one-with-the-bike, too-fast-for-conscious-thought, death-­defying fast-twitch motion—that links the act of riding to the act of writing. It’s about dissociative states. The way that being lost in a daydream and typing at the same time—literally training one’s fingers to translate moments of unconscious dream into typewritten words—relates to the idea of bike-­as-­extension-of-body, to executing athletic feats that couldn’t be executed if, in the moment, there were deliberate thought. The preparation is conscious. The ride is reflex.

I’ve never once searched for videos of skydiving or ski jumping. Part of the attraction is that I used to mountain bike a lot. It’s something I did seriously and crazily and more and more fearlessly. That is, until the day I crashed, and cracked my helmet, and degloved my jaw, and ended up with a face full of stitches and a neck brace to wear. A young semi-pro rider was taking me out to race trails and give me some tips. It was beautiful to watch him, as I followed right behind. He looked like the riders in the videos. He’d drop down a steep incline, and then I’d drop down, my bike fully out in front of me, my butt hanging over the back wheel. We’d hit bottom and pop up the other side, until the time when he popped up and I didn’t. I can’t tell you what happened, since, along with the stitches, I also had retrograde amnesia and don’t remember anything after I started the last run. But I do remember him telling me, at the top, to think about using my front brake more, not to rely on the rear alone. If you asked me to re-create the accident, I’d bet anything that I was conscious of that advice, that I thought about it in the moment, and that that flash of intent turned me too slow. I squeezed the lever and put out my lights.

I never got my nerve back for biking in the same way. But I am happy these days to borrow some. To relive that vertiginous feeling on trails a thousand times more dangerous than any I tried. Or maybe it’s just that sitting down to write every day feels a lot like throwing yourself down a mountain.

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