We still haven’t recovered from last weekend's Simple Session and I mean that in a physical and emotional way. Quite simply - it's one of the best weekends in BMX right now. Not only does it bring a sizeable bunch of the BMX community together but it also gives riders a taste of the Baltics, in every kind of way.
Simple Session can crush you, it can mature you and it can mentally break you down until you find yourself sobbing into a Park Inn pillow while browsing Sky Scanner for flights home. If you are planning on going next year then maybe you need to read our guide for surviving in the darkness of Northern Europe for five very long days.
1. Don’t get an early flight home.
If you are a rider then you may have to beg your sponsor or do some of your own flight searching but trust me, getting an afternoon flight home on the Monday will increase your life expectancy by 5-6 years. Sunday night is notoriously one of the craziest and it’s literally a booze carnival of self-reproach and debauchery where 70+ riders are already fighting a 4-day hangover - which has now escalated in a drowsy and drunken massacre. Be smart and attend the airport at a reasonable hour or suffer the consequences.
2. Take the jacket you think you won’t need.
You’re looking at the weather on your phone, you’re looking at your jackets and you’re thinking to yourself “I’ll be fine if I just take a hoody and a coach jacket”. Then you get there and you are greeted with the cold painful blizzard of the Baltics and you realize that nothing, not even satins loving embrace can warm you up. Last year I found myself wondering the lonely mall stores like Leonardo DiCaprio in the Reverent looking for the skin of dead bear.
3. Drink in the day or die.
Before I go on, I would like to state that we at DIG do not condone drinking booze but we are also realists and journalists (kinda) who tell the story how it is.
BMX contests are great - but for everyone that isn’t riding it’s just a lot of sitting and looking at tail whips all day, sometimes 15 in just one combo. After a while you start to get numb, you do weird things like say “shall we get some food” 20 minutes after you’ve eaten. You also find yourself glancing at the clock and thinking, “Is 3pm too early to start drinking”? The answer is yes, but inside an area where time strangely turns in on itself - it’s really the only answer to enduring everything with ease. Survival is about lasting certain situations under adverse or unusual circumstances, Simple Session is all of those.
4. Find a safe place.
Simple Session is all around you. It’s like an impassive diseased blanket of decadence that wraps you up and feeds off you, its love and hate in equal measures. The human body can only take so much vodka, pasta and awkward sleeping arrangements so you must find a safe place to re charge your life. You will not find this in the Park Inn, or the Park Inn lobby and you will not find this in the Saku Sports Hall. You may have to seek sanctuary at an undisclosed location.
5. Prepare for the worst.
If you are a “Professional” BMX rider and you qualify top 12 then you will probably find yourself trapped in an unusual void at around 5am where you are presented by two options: one is to get a taxi and go to sleep and the other is to enjoy the skin to skin comforts of two Estonian girls. Prepare for the worst, prepare to know that you will be fathering children from the other side of the world and in a language you do not understand.
You laugh now...
