OCALA, Fla.—For more than two decades GoneRiding has staged mountain bike races like the Twelve Hours of Santos in the Southeastern United States, and for more than two decades riders have shown up to meet their friends, beat their bodies, challenge their skills, and share good times.
Not all the races are twelve hours long; GoneRiding hosts normal thirty-to-forty mile races, as well as off-road footraces and off-road triathlons, but the toughest events, and biggest parties, are the endurance events.
The 2015 fit the form: hundreds of riders from around the region showed up to camp, eat, swap stories, and ride before, during and after the race. There was a slightly more serious note about this year’s gathering, however.
GoneRiding co-founder Dave Berger has always been an adventurer. He started riding racing Motocross motorcycles in 1973, bought his first mountain bikes in the early ‘80s, kept racing Motocross, then added mountain bike racing when his son was born in the late ’80s. He fired up his motocross bike yet again in the early 2000’s
“First time I rode a ’mountain bike' was probably in 1983,” Berger explained shortly after the start of the race. [Back in the day a “mountain bike” was any bike the rider took off-road; most had wider tires and handlebars, but otherwise were just regular bicycles] “The sport was really new then—it didn’t impress me too much at the time. I kind of just hung the bike on my wall; it sat there for about six years.”
Motocross did impress him. “That was kind of the first sport I really got into, my first passion. I decided to give that up when my son was about to be born; I dusted off the mountain bike and that was in ‘89. The next weekend I started racing and I’ve been in love with it ever since.”
