Kraft - Mountain Bike! San Francisco and the Bay Area: A Wide-Grin Ride Guide

I fell in love with bikes because they were fun: challenging your friend as to who could ride their BMX bike in the tightest circle, for the longest time, without falling down is just the kind of stupid physics that any great childhood is built on. I became addicted to cycling out of necessity: simply needing a way to get from point A to point B and back before I was old enough to drive a car. I grew up in the country, seven miles from townover the hills, far away, down a long and winding dirt roadand before I got my drivers license, in order to see my town-bound friends I either had to beg my parents for a ride or get over that hill under my own power. Being the self-sufficient personality that I am, I chose the latter. Rather than walk, run, or hitchhike everywhere, I opted for the much more efficient and fun (sorry, runners) mountain bike. It was an eye-opening experience for my teenage self, to go from feeling almost completely isolated to completely connected, and trading only a couple of sore legs for the effort.

It didnt take long for my friends and myself to get into mountain bike racing, and we raced all over Northern California, thanks to our parents chaperoning. That was when I got my first taste of many of the rides presented in this book. We raced under the mantles of Tinker Juarez, John Tomac, and Julie Furtado in the glorious young days of the sport, which rose rapidly to Olympic prominence. During college I switched to racing road bikes, based in large part on the Lance Armstrong influence. I spent the first couple years out of college pursuing the professional road-racing circuit, and though I did get close, the arc of my success fell just short of the pressures-of-life wall, so I swapped my skinny-tired race bike for a single-speed 29er mountain bike commuter and an office career and re-sparked my love of the trails.

Now I live and work in San Francisco, and I choose the bike as my primary form of transportationI wouldnt have it any other way. Yes, I do own a car, and I do respect the public transportation system here, but the bottom line is that San Francisco is a riders city and the Bay Area is a riders region. Whether you are a commuter, road cyclist, or mountain biker, this region is one of the most amazing places to pedal a bicycle, and the 40 rides described in this book represent the best and most accessible legal mountain bike trails to be experienced within a 70-mile radius of the San Francisco city center. Some of these rides I grew up with, some now serve as my de facto gym membership (that is, close enough to get to after work), and many I experienced for the first time while researching this book.