Coach Profile: Paul TerryWhen I was 4 all my brothers could ride a bike and I couldn’t. So one day I grabbed a bike and climbed up on an old yellow bucket to get on it. I kept trying for a couple of hours until I could ride it. When my brothers got home, they took that bike apart and fixed it all up for me. I never stopped riding after that. I learned to fix up old bikes so I always had a cool bike even though most of the parts came out of trash cans.
When I was about 12, I worked all summer so I could get a real BMX bike, there weren’t many in those days, so I bought a Suzuki which I still have. My friends and I would ride first thing in the morning and show up back home at about dark every day. I put about 1.5 zillion miles on that bike. I first started racing BMX in about 1977 and loved it, but I wasn’t very fast because the races were too short. Im #33.
In ’79 I bought a proper road bike and did my first race in a local club race. I got dropped. I kept riding and read about training and started riding longer and faster. After about 2 months I didn’t get dropped any more. I kept riding and after about 2 more months none of those guys ever beat me again. So I started going to real races like the Iron Horse Classic which was the closest race to where I lived. It was really hard, and really fun. A few years of that and I started doing pretty well and won my share of races. I wanted to go to the Olympic Training center because one of my friends had done that. So I trained hard and started getting fast, but my knees couldn’t handle the mileage and I got chronic tendonitis. In those days, there wasn’t much knowledge of physical therapy, and had to pretty much quit racing. I never really stopped riding though. About this time there were these new fangled things called mountain bikes. So I got one and pretty much never stopped riding them. We used to go bike packing all the time – about 30 years before bike packing was a thing. In about 1990 we rode all of Colorado from north to south on dirt. It was awesome. This was a hard day.
I raced quite a bit too, but not seriously. In those days we raced DH on our regular bikes which were horrible by today’s standards. This bike weighed about 20lbs and was great for cross country, not for DH. Big Bear, Ca
One of the most important things I learned from riding mountain bikes is if there is river crossing, and everyone is standing and watching, you’re going to get wet because there is probably a big hole. My favorite trail is Mag7 but only if I’m really fit because it’s burly. Second is Captain Ahab. Around here it’s probably Insurgent but I really like everything on a bike.
The town where I grew up Farmington NM has the oldest continuously run mountain bike race in the world, the Road Apple Rally. It’s super fun. If I’m not riding, I’m skiing. My favorite thing about coaching is seeing people really start to love riding bikes. I love it when I see people start believing in themselves.
I’ve been riding my whole life and hope everyone will.
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