Phatman

I am a cat 4 roadie who recently tried getting into mountain biking. I work at a shop, a after building up several neat mountain bikes, i decided that it would be cool to give mountainbiking a try. so I outfitted my "round campus" SS mountain bike with knobbies and went out on the trail with a few guys from work.

I quickly found out though that I am in far better shape than 90% of the guys that I ride with, and thus can keep up with the big boys so to speak. my problem is that I have almost no technical skills whatsoever except for the clipless-equipped bunnyhop.

I ended up falling and breaking my wrist monday while on a ride. I was up with the hard core mountainbikers, and they took a tricky line over this bridge. I had been following these fellas lines for the last hour and a half, so w/o hesitation I went on this bridge, my tire got stuck in a rut, and I fell off, into the stream below, maybe a 2 foot drop down. I slammed my head into a rock, my helmet did its job, and so the damages were limited to a broken scaphoid bone in my wrist and 17 stitches total on my face.

It was extremely frustrating to be in my situation. I am very fit, but I am lacking in skills. To ride with the people with no skills would probably be benificial, b/c we would ride less technical trails, but by god, they are sooooo slow.

so anyway, I've got 8-12 weeks of recovery time to look forward to, perhaps the slow guys will be able to keep up by then.

but has anyone ever really gone through this before with a roadie to mtn transition?