Beat the Haters Fridays: September
Mountain Biking in Eshtaol Forest and Hiking Nahal Sorek
You know you're doing something right when YouTube recommends you a video titled: “Is 40 too late to start mountain biking?”
Part of my resolution for 5785 is to go every other Friday on a hike or bike ride. I became interested in the idea of mountain biking after riding some trails with my kids at the beginning of the summer back at Tel Afek. So once school started and it was easier for me to get access to a car on Fridays, I called up one of my friends (from a Facebook group) and asked if he wanted to come along for a bike ride. He recommended that we go for a ride in the Eshtaol forest between Modiin and Bet Shemesh.
Quick break: the reason I have this resolution is because there was a study I recently saw which asked two groups of people, those under 30 and those over 50 to count 120 seconds in their heads. The group under 30 averaged 115 reals seconds to count the time whereas the over 50 group only needed 87! Time moves 24% faster in your head as one gets older. The article finishes that the best counter to this phenomenon is to increase dopamine levels in your brain, and that means doing things that upend routine.
Hence, Beat the Haters Fridays, where I go out and explore the beautiful country God has given us Jews and show the Haters (no shortage) that they won’t stop us. A side benefit is that I get the dopamine my brain needs to stop time decay. Wins for everyone!
Back to the reviews. Eshtaol forest is a great place to bike. It is perhaps a wee-bit more challenging than it should be for someone who is getting “Is 40 too late to start mountain biking?” videos on YouTube, but fun nevertheless. I fell off my bike twice and I didn’t even care because I went in to have fun, and sometimes that means falling. The highlight of the trip for me was biking along the Burma trail, the very route that Israeli soldiers forged through the forest in order to break the siege on Jerusalem in 1948. It was an honor to ride along this path, knowing the sacrifices that were made in order to allow me to do so. As I told the friend I was riding with, “we are riding and writing history at the same exact time”. What a time to be alive (and throw shade at haters)!
The ride also included going through massive vineyards. It is so interesting to think and know that the farmers share this land and let people bike through it. There were a few monuments along the way as well. Basically, if you have enough money, KKL will find a place in a forest for you to build whatever monument you want. #lifegoals
After about 3ish hours of biking, we arrived back at our car, me just a little worse for the wear, and my friend overcoming the pain of a bee sting he got like 5 minutes into the ride.
Fast forward two weeks and it was time to try a hike. I had planned on doing Nahal David down by the Dead Sea, but the forecast was for very high temperatures there today, despite it being the end of September. So I went searching for something that had more suitable weather conditions. After a bunch of Googling I found the Black Trail at Nahal Sorek would probably fit the bill. I don’t know if there is a color system for the trails in Israel like there is for ski slopes, but I would put this trail at the high end of moderate. Again, I haven’t done a ton of hikes so my n is very small but there were definitely part I found challenging and where I had to go down on all fours in order to traverse some terrain. Also like 50% of the trail is only wide enough for one person and 50% of that is at the edge of a cliff, so not for the faint of heart.
However, the reward is the views! They are just incredible, especially since they include the railroad tracks of the old train that went from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. There are also supposedly offshoots to go see some ruins but I didn’t see any signage and also I was probably too tired to do extra excursions that weren’t part of the official path. In the two trips I have taken so far, there is this point where I feel like I am basically out of energy, only to find out I am only halfway done. Oh well, dopamine!
This was another 3.5 hour hike, not including the hour before I started where I davened and watched the sunrise. I need to go help setup for Shabbat now so that will have to be enough for now. I will hopefully be back on the circuit after the Chagim, Shana Tovah!
Stay tuned! My post about my company trip to Crete will be out in the next few days!