NEW SALEM — Growing up in New Salem, Ryan Conley and his friends built their own bikes with parts from the junkyard.

“As a kid, I remember building jumps on the side of the road …. We used to build little mountain-bike trails,” he said.

Now grown, Conley just hosted the first Helderberg Cliffhanger, a mountain-bike race that drew over 350 participants to Thacher Park on Father’s Day.

Conley came up with the name for the competition, a nod to the escarpment’s limestone cliffs as well as a reference to the suspense of racing. He also designed the race logo, which features mountains with a silhouetted cyclist hanging from a steep slope.

“I’m a builder,” said Conley, “so I like to build and design and create things.”

“The coolest part to me,” Conley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, “is that 160 of those registered were kids from 3 years old on a strider bike to 8 years old in a mountain-bike group through high school.”

Conley himself has a 7-year-old son, Pierce, who raced and he also has a 5-year-old daughter, Charlize.

He promoted the race with Andy Ruiz, whom he called “a local cyclist legend.”

Conley had done all the legwork to set up the race last year but, he said, because of the coronavirus, Thacher State Park was hesitant to have that many people gathering together.

“So I had a lot of the ideas and the course nailed down and the map nailed down,” he said. The course consisted of a seven-and-a-half mile loop that racers circled three times.

The variety of trails at Thacher is “fantastic,” Conley said, describing sections with gnarly roots as well as relatively open sections, appealing to all sorts of riders. The course went by a rock sculpture and a beaver-dam pond, both of which Conley described as beautiful.

The view from Hailes Cave Pavilion takes in mountain ranges in Massachusetts and Vermont, he said.

“I designed the course and then I had to go and maintain the course,” Conley said. Part of the course was on the Long Path, which stretches from the George Washington Bridge in New York City through Thacher Park and on to the Adirondacks.

The segment of the Long Path in Thacher Park is typically wet, said Conley, so he dug drainage ditches and cut dead trees into two-foot lengths to make log bridges over muddy spots.

He also removed rocks that he thought might pose a danger to kids who were riding the route. “You have to be careful,” he warned, though, “because mountain biking, you want a little bit of challenge …. You don’t want to just make it a flat pavement highway.”

He enjoyed finding the balance in the trails he worked on, so they were both challenging and safe.

Conley had rediscovered cycling when he was 30 and said he was “hooked immediately.” 

“I have high energy and I like to release it,” he said. Cycling gave him an outlet for his intensity.

It also gave him a community. He is a proud member of the Capital Bicycle Racing Club.

When he first started riding with groups, Conley said, he was slow. “They would ride away from me … They call it dropping … As I rode more, I got stronger and stronger. And then the guys were like, ‘Oh, you should do a race.’”

He started out with road racing, on a light bike with narrow tires, and loved the adrenaline rush.

“I really enjoyed pushing my body to a limit of exhaustion and then past that to complete the race or to sprint to the finish,” he said.

Add to that, the training with like-minded people, Conley said, “It was a life changer.”

He then progressed to doing cyclo-cross, which involves many short laps with obstacles requiring the rider to dismount and carry his bike.

A cyclo-cross bike is a road-bike style, Conley explains, but it has knobby tires for more grip in the grass. Whereas a mountain-bike race can take two or three hours, a cyclo-cross race is usually 30 or 45 minutes of “hard, hard effort … a short race of high intensity.”

As a father now, Conley said, he likes being competitive in a way that takes less time away from his kids for training and for races.

Other than riding to stay in shape, Conley runs up the hill, by which he means the Helderberg escarpment, near his New Salem house.

He explains the reason for running: “Because a lot of cyclo-cross, you’re racing, you’re taking the bike and putting it on your shoulder and running up the hill.”

Conley worked with other club members to build a mountain bike trail system in Delmar, which Bethlehem turned into a town park, he said. The club’s treasurer, Gene Primomo, had for years used trails on what became the Normans Kill Ravines Park, Conley said.

Primomo approached Conley and others in the club with the idea of making mountain-bike trails on land that the town had used for brush and snow. “And then, last year, the town came in and said, ‘Let’s make this a town park,’” Conley recalled.

“Each individual person brings their own thing to the club,” he said, “but then, when the club organizes something, we’re all together, like it happens, then it’s just wonderful.”

While he loves working together with other club members, Conley has an equal passion for competing against them. A rival he particularly admires is Ryan O’Donnell who started a club for young riders so his own son would have kids to cycle with. The young Flow Riders now number in the hundreds.

Conley and O’Donnell race against each other in cyclo-cross events. Both men are busy running their businesses and being fathers. Before a race, they shake hands and say, “Good luck, buddy.” 

But, when they’re on the course, “It’s every man for himself. Like, I’m not going to injure him, but I’m going to ride as hard as I can to beat him because he’s my friend,” said Conley. “And there’s bragging rights and it’s fun.”

Conley is already looking ahead to next year’s Helderberg Cliffhanger.

“I just have lots of passion for everything that I do. I’m just so glad that this worked out,” he said of the inaugural Cliffhanger race. “And I’m so glad that other people are going to find out about it.”

Even if it gets just a few more people into cycling, Conley said, he’ll be happy. “It makes me smile,” he said.