Mountain Biking

The Ultimate Guide to Mountain Biking for Beginners MTB

By: Marion B. Barfe

Narrated by: Jesse Gross

And so, the adventure begins....

Over the last few years, mountain biking has grown to be one of the most popular outdoor sports. Mountain biking consists of the following categories: cross country, trail riding, all mountain, downhill, freeride, and dirt jumping. This sport requires endurance, core strength and balance, bike-handling skills, and self-reliance. It’s critical that a person learns the basics of how what is required to master this sport. Unless trained properly, serious injuries can result.

This book provides an in-depth look at what is involved in mountain biking. It will educate the listener on the proper techniques, bikes, gear, and terrain levels for each course. The time you take to listen to this book could help protect your life and allow you to discover a sport that will provide great fitness benefits, and also allow you to experience new adventures an ordinary sport wouldn’t be able to provide.

©2019 Zen Mastery (P)2019 Zen Mastery

Very dated, despite its 2018 release

The author of this "audiobook" (audiopamphlet) is clearly very biased to XC mountain biking, and clearly ignorant of any other types of mountain biking, and also clearly about 6 years behind on many things.

As three, examples, gears, styles of mountain biking, and weights of bikes

She mentions that mountain bikes have as many as 27 gear ratios. They do if you buy them from Walmart. There's not a respectable MTB brand manufacturing even entry-level bikes with 2 chainrings anymore, let alone 3. Everything as of this writing is a 1x12 with 1 chainring and 12 cassettes.

And styles of MTB. She blatantly says that XC is the epitome of mountain biking and allows you to see more and what everyone ought to be doing. That may be true, but she doesn't even mention Enduro biking, which is fairly new but certainly was very popular at the time of publication. Enduro bikes can take the hits of a downhill bike, but are geared towards being able to also do the climbs and cross-country experiences. But when you remember that Trail bikes and All-Mountain bikes exist, XC isn't even a real mountain bike anymore. It may as well have the curved bars of a friggin street bike. Because no respectable mountain biker who really wants to see it all is going to be satisfied with an XC bike and their pathetic shocks when compared to the possibilities of a Trail with an inch or more travel out back and up to two inches more travel up front. I've never yet seen someone doing any kind of actual mountain biking on an XC. The bikepackers and multiday mountain bikers who are actually doing ups and downs of mountains wouldn't caught dead with an XC bike, mainly because they would probably kill them with how bad they do on any kind of trail that isn't perfectly smooth--aka any actual MOUNTAIN trail. XC bikes are a joke.

And lastly, weight. I have an Enduro bike. it weighs 29lbs. Granted it's not the 24lbs she claims, but I haven't ever seen a mountain bike in any category that weighs more than 35 lbs in the last few years except those sold at Walmart. That information she gave is just outright incorrect. No downhill biker or freestyle biker would risk their life on anything weighing as much as 40 lbs. The reason being is you can't control it, like riding a tank down the hill. Serious mountain bikers spend literal thousands of dollars trying to shave off as many grams on their bike as possible.


Lengthy review on just three points that were blatantly wrong or lacking any useful information. Too much of this pamphlet was in that category.

I do believe the author could spend a bunch more time researching and come out with a much longer book that would be worth having. I'd buy that.