For most kids, a bike is their first taste of freedom. This interview from the ML archives (published in 2014) captures 11-year-old Seth Sherlock at the beginning of his ride. Words :: Feet Banks // photos :: Mark Gribbon.
Trust an 11-year-old to sum it up perfectly: “When you’re riding your bike, you feel free,” Seth Sherlock explains. “You can do whatever you want. It’s just fun— feeling free is a great feeling, you know.”
For most kids, a bike is their first taste of freedom, of mobility beyond parental control. Seth, a born and raised Squamish kid, can remember the day his dad gave him that initial taste of two-wheeled freedom.
“I got a bike and got my dad to take the training wheels off right away,” Seth says, recalling what must be one of his earliest memories. “My dad would run behind me and I remember yelling at him to ‘Hold on!’, until I looked back and realized he’d let go a long time ago. I was about four then and I’ve been biking ever since.”
Seth has also been taking full advantage of the benefits of growing up in the epicentre of Canadian mountain biking with a local talent pool that is all deep end.
After a half a dozen years of following his dad in and around the Squamish trail networks, Seth began hounding local rider/builder/director Kevin Landry for beta on some of Squamish’s burlier lines. Then he started knocking them off. In the summer of 2013, Landry, a riding buddy of Seth’s dad, teamed his Artbarn film crew with the cinematic wizards at Whistler Creek Productions and produced a four-minute “Seth Edit” entitled #whatwereyoudoingat10.
The video shows four-foot-tall Seth slaying lines that scare most riders twice his age and climaxes in a massive creek gap crash. It’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and gathered hundreds of comments, mostly from stoked (and envious) riders reminiscing about their own early days of two-wheeled freedom. But it wouldn’t be the Internet without anonymous jealousy and negative trolls.
I sat down with Seth in his parent’s kitchen to talk about it.
Mountain Life: That video went bananas online. Do you read the comments?
Seth Sherlock: I read all the comments and I comment back a bit. We have fun seeing all the haters and just laughing. Haters gonna hate.
ML: What about the kids at school?
Seth: They were into it. My friend Logan Van Esteren was one of the first guys I told and he was really stoked the second it came out…The girls weren’t as into it.
ML: There’s no bike park in that edit.
Seth: No. I ride the park a lot when I’m in DFX bike camp in Whistler, but I prefer the Squamish style of riding, which is rad because I live here. The park is fun too, though — I like steep, sketchy, rooty stuff. My favourite Whistler trail is Ride Don’t Slide.
ML: That was a pretty gnarly crash at the end of your video. Are you ever worried about getting hurt?
Seth: I had my first big crash on the first day I ever biked, but after I cleaned up my cuts I was back on it. One day, me and my buddy Noah were pinning it down a big hill and I let off the brakes and at the bottom I hit a rock and crashed and peeled my face off. That was my second big crash. So far I’m OK.
ML: Are you riding with kids your own age very much? We featured Jackson Goldstone in the mag last year.
Seth: Mostly I ride with my dad and with some of his friends too. Most of the kids I’ve been riding with since I was young have fallen behind. Jackson and I have totally different styles and we can be pretty competitive, but he’s a really fun dude to ride with.
ML: You’ll be turning 12 at the end of this summer and you’re already filming bike segments and travelling. What else do you like to do?
Seth: I ride BMX as well. I ski a lot. Trampoline is important, that’s my hobby. At school they make us do team sports, and volleyball and badminton are my favourite. Mostly, I really like music. I play drums, clarinet, electric guitar, ukulele and recorder. I’m stoked because my next school has a band class.
ML: Now you have some companies helping you out. Does it ever feel like a job? Do you ever feel pressure to bike?
Seth: I don’t really feel pressure. You just do what you do. My parents are super supportive — my dad’s an awesome riding buddy and my mom is scared to look, but they’ve both been awesome. Eventually it could be a job, that’d be cool, but for now I just want to ride my bike and have a good time. It’s just biking, riding a bike.
•••
EDITOR’S NOTE: Seth was alone when I interviewed him, but his maturity and presence was really incredible to witness in a kid his age (although his mom did give him shit later for not offering me a drink of water when I arrived). I got a chance to speak with Seth’s dad, Steve Sherlock, on the phone afterwards and talk about how, for an Internet sensation, Seth is one of the coolest, most grounded kids I’ve ever met.
Steve: “He’s definitely grown into himself and it’s cool to see his confidence get more developed. I’ve always tried to give him opportunities like bike camps and stuff, but we’ve always based our bike riding primarily on having fun. As the years passed he kept getting faster and pretty soon he was consistently riding right on my tail. I wondered, “Am I getting shittier or is he getting really good?”
ML: How do you feel about the success of his web video?
“We had the opportunity to make that edit with some friends of mine who are in the industry and it got a lot of success, more than we thought. It’s weird. You have to be careful what you wish for and be smart and keep it fun. What I like is how the bike has helped him find independence. Seth can cruise along on his own now and enjoy the freedom that comes with being a kid out in the forest, finding jumps out in the middle of nowhere and just having fun on his bike. He knows he is lucky to live where he is and have the opportunities we have. If we lived back east, maybe he’d be skating and playing hockey every day — out here we ski and ride pow, and in the summer we ride bikes. That is the joy of living here, and why we make the sacrifices we make — so we can ride and enjoy the outdoors.
Check out what Seth’s up to, ten years after this interview!
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