Some Girls Love Adventures & Tattoos It’s Me I’m Some Girls Shirt, hooodie

“I get called crazy all the time. Mostly in a friendly way. But I think it also kind of diminishes what I do.”

Brian speaks laconically, carefully considering my questions before answering. He’s eager to talk about what he does—the risks, the skill, and how the latter enables the former. But I also sense a reticence as his blue-gray eyes dart shyly to the right, averting the camera. For the past year he’s devoted himself entirely to his films, getting the colors and the light and the sound just right, with an intentionality not often seen in the world of cycling cinema. Now this man, someone described as intensely private by his friends and family, is just handing his story over to some New York City journalist he’s never spoken to before.

Journalists, we both agree, can sometimes be misleading. Especially journalists writing about those sports deemed, for lack of a better word, “extreme.” In such cases, we can default to facile summations, ones that praise daredevilism over skill, as if, in Brian’s case, the only prerequisite to descend at such dizzying speeds is a lack of brain cells.

This of course isn’t the case. In conversation, Brian exudes an intelligence that borders on the philosophical, and he seems to employ this same deep-thinking mentality when riding. Descriptors abound anytime Brian straddles a bike. The guy rips down a road the way Alex Honnold free-climbs up a mountain: quickly, obsessively, death-defyingly, and, above all, mesmerizingly. Brian shot the first installment of Descent Disciples two years ago, and when the pandemic hit he decided to venture further into the unknown by ditching his messenger job to pursue filmmaking full-time. Though he had no formal experience as a filmmaker, his work immediately struck a chord. Video views racked up, comments poured in, fans gushed, and his audience—stuck indoors due to COVID and perhaps looking for the type of enrapturing content that could free them from their domestic confines—swelled. But with this sudden acclaim came criticism, too.

Unlike Honnold, who plies his craft on the barren rock walls of inaccessible mountains, Brian often shoots his segments on public roads, sharing the asphalt with motorists and other cyclists, and this opens him up to scrutiny. Yes, his descending is fast and, at times, perhaps dangerous, especially in the eyes of the less talented. But these risks are primarily assumed by Brian and, sometimes, his small crew. There’s also the fact that his style of riding has the potential to contribute to the negative stereotypes cyclists face in the eyes of drivers who don’t like us, or, in the event of a collision, want to offload blame by claiming we flout the rules of the road.

To Brian, the dilemma is more “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Visit our Social Network: Beutee Pinterest,Instagram, Twitter and Our Blog beuteenet blogspot