I got my first taste of mountain biking yesterday, when I went to Ljungsbro with Patrick and his son Jonathan.  Suffice to say that it was an experience like nothing I'd experienced before, and I loved every minute of it, even though it was tough and I made more than a couple of basic errors.  In all these years, though I've ridden mountain bikes, I've only ridden them on bad roads in India, or over tarmac/snow, in Sweden and never on any real mountain trail,  and so this experience was rather unique, and I came away happy, without any injuries of note and with a bunch of lessons learned for future trail rides :) Here are some of them:

1. Never have a kick-stand on a mountain-bike; it shaves off at least an inch of ground clearance (which matters big time, when you are riding over and between rocks and hefty tree roots) and creates a terrific and most irritating racket. My friends' bikes were stealthy-silent while mine sounded like a bike on the verge of falling apart!

2. Shift early;  getting stuck in a wrong gear on the road can be bad,  but on a mountain trail, it can bring you to a quick and inglorious stop.  If it's a particulally steep incline or narrow path and you can't clip out in time, it can get quite serious, which brings up the next lesson.

1. Practice clipping out super quick; this one's important no matter what kind of riding you do, but you get a lot more warning while doing road biking than when you are on a mountain trail.  Failure to clip out soon enough would mean taking a fall and it could be into a bramble bush, onto rocks or worse, into a deep ditch, so practice on this till you can clip out instantly and without conscious effort.

2. Weight transfer; shift weight as far back as possible on descents and as far forward as possible while making climbs. I made mistakes causing my front wheel to lift up a couple of times, forcing me to brake to get the weight forward, to avoid falling over backwards.

3. Relax the grip on the handle-bars.  I guess this is a classic beginner's mistake, but I found myself gripping the bar so tightly that my fingers started to hurt.  It got better when I consciously eased off on the grip and put two fingers on the brake levers, instead of gripping the bar with all of them in a clench.</span>