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How do mountain bikers actually wipe out? Josh went digging and found a study that looked at 534 mountain bike crash videos. Just over half were over-the-bars crashes, about half happened on moderate descents, 64% came from poor jump landings, and three quarters were at speeds of 18.6 mph or faster. Josh, who admits he rides cautiously and never jumps, takes that as a green light to keep doing exactly what he's doing. Dane has a few opinions, and a parking lot crash story that doesn't help the "just go slower" theory.

Episode 136, "Crash, Heal, Repeat: Mountain Biking After an Injury," goes from the numbers to the hard part, which is recovery. Dane and Josh talk about the difference between crashing and getting hurt, learning how to fall, pads and protective gear, and why the mental side of coming back from a crash can take longer than the physical side. Expect plenty of stories from Angel Fire, Whistler, and Tucson, plus a few ways to ride smarter without giving up the fun.

Injury Mechanisms in MTN Biking: A Systematic Video Analysis of 534 Cases

Link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12177224/

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Can you buy speed? It's the question every mountain biker asks themselves while staring at a $10k build in the shop window, and it's the one Josh and Dane finally sit down to debate. They break the argument into pieces — weight, suspension, drivetrain efficiency, tires, frame stiffness, brakes — and figure out which of those upgrades are real and which ones are just good marketing. Turns out, the honest answer is somewhere in the middle, and it depends a lot less on the price tag than you'd think.

Dane brings shop-floor stories about what actually gets people faster (hint: it's usually not what they think), and Josh lays out the numbers on price-per-pound and where the smart money stops making sense. They also cover depreciation, the emotional cost of crashing an expensive bike, and why your tires deserve way more attention than they're probably getting. And because it's MTNCOG, there's a detour into Josh's worst ride of the year that has nothing to do with bike specs and everything to do with bad timing.

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Dane and Josh dig into nine grease-under-the-fingernails topics this week, kicking things off with a question that's been bugging Josh for weeks: why can two identical forks feel completely different? Turns out it's a mix of manufacturing tolerances, bushing wear, and oil that's gone stale — and the guys walk through how altitude changes your air spring feel too (plus the weird lawsuit history behind why some forks have bleeder buttons and others don't). From there it's straight into hub end caps falling off, why your spokes might be pinging after a truing, and the right way to torque your pedals without stripping a crank.

The back half gets into chain wax gone wrong — including a lube-mixing mistake that turned Josh's chain into a gunky mess — plus a real debate over which shop tools are actually worth the money versus the ones collecting dust on the wall. They close out with a cautionary tale about e-bike internal cable routing that'll make you think twice before DIY-ing a dropper post install. If you wrench on your own bike even occasionally, this is one to bookmark.

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