The Fit Bikes crew at Street Fighter 6

Over the weekend I felt the need for speed, and showed some haulin' butt bicycling in three different flavors.  It's Monday morning (here on the West Coast), time to get the blood flowing with some New School street riding.  A few months ago the Fit Bikes posses loaded up the van for a long ride east to Phoenix.  They joined the roving BMX bandit brigade for the Street Fighter 6 Jam, on a tour of AZ street spots to see who could step up and throw down.  Big drops to flat, and big hops off a little ramp.  Good stuff.

You guys all know where to find your Fit Bikes and components, right?  Yep, that link below will get it done for ya, and have cool stuff showing up at your door...

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Classic Brian Foster- Holy Fit

While this Bock Bikes Blog is new, I'm an old guy.  My biggest riding days were in the 1980's and 1990's, then I faded when I became a taxi driver.  Whatever era you start riding in, that sets up your perspective of what's good riding, what's cool and what's not.  We tend to carry those perspectives on as we get older.

In the 1980's, when we called it "BMX freestyle," we'd go to contests, and see 40 different people doing tricks that none of us had ever seen before.  Originality was a key factor.  In those days, 15 novice guys would be busting new stuff we'd never seen.  The problem is that, you can only have that scenario at the beginning of a sport.  After a while, the foundational tricks have mostly been invented, and riding usually turns into combining variations, or doing the same tricks bigger, or on different terrain.  Contests, unfortunately, kind of turn into gymnastics.  When I started working at Cirque du Soleil in 1993, I soon realized that any aerial sport, BMX airs, skate airs, freestyle ski jumping, whatever, eventually turns into circus acrobatics.  You have flips, you have spins, and you have flips with spins (corked 360 flips, for example).  Then you have whatever basic maneuvers are allowed by the vehicle itself.  By that I mean, on a bike you have barspins, tailwhips, tabletops, and on a skateboard you have indy airs, methods, judo airs, in addition to flips and spins.

So the high level (big money) contests turn into guys doing the most flips, spins, corked flips, barspins and tailwhips possible.  But style, good old epic style, doesn't score well in a major contest.  It doesn't matter what sport.  But style is what it's really all about.  You learn a trick.  You get a trick dialed, so you can do it every time.  You learn to STOMP that trick.  THEN you do it with style. Hopefully.

So for years now, every time someone on Facebook or YouTube shared the latest video of some rider doing a quintuple barspin, triple backflip, corked out 1440, quadruple tailwhip... or whatever, I would watch a video afterwards that just had good style.  Usually that video was one of my old roommate, Brian Foster.  Most of the time it was this Holy Fit section.  This is just one of those epic edits, oozing with style, that makes you remember why you ride.

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Brian Foster Living the Dream

Here's some really good riding for Good Friday.  Fit bikes legend, Brian Foster, from late 2018. 

Apparently his long, on the down low transition into a physical therapy doctor hasn't affected his bike skills.  Want to hear something crazy, when I was roommates with Brian at the P.O.W. BMX House in about 1993, he used to ride a place called Jones Track, in Riverside, a lot.  Way back then, trails were a lot smaller, and dirt jumping, as its own sport, was just hitting its stride. 

I remember Brian several times, coming back from an afternoon's session at Jones Track, both exhilarated and frustrated.  The thing about Jones Track was that most of the jumps were only a foot or so tall.  I could jump a lot of them.  But they were set up in really weird combos that just jacked with everybody's rhythm.  They were just these straight lines of little jumps in a field, but weird combos of little jumps that made them hard as hell to get all the way through.  Top riders, even B.F. himself, would head into a line, get 2/3 through, and get squirrely and jump off to the side. 

But that was the whole point, small and technical, like when jumpers learn flatland tricks and blend them into their riding in new ways.  I just wanted to tell that little story, just to remind people that even though Brian has been defying gravity for years, and putting together lines of rhythm that a Jazz drummer would be proud of, he really is human.  There was a time, long, long ago, when one foot high jumps could frustrate him. 

So hang in there, ride everything you can, and build all kinds of skills.  Some day you may ride like Brian Foster.  OK, not really, ain't nobody that rides quite like Brian.  But you can still be pretty damn smooth and flowy. And if you're looking for a Fit bikes of your own, check out...

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