I don't mean that. You'll notice from my videos I go over rocks all the time. But the emphasis is that if you're seeking them out so that you can hit them and go flying, then that's a recipe for disaster. When you jump off something, you want it to be a somewhat regular surface, but when you hit a rock (which by the sounds of it was more like a boulder), you can never tell really what shape it is, and exactly how it's going to affect the bike. Worse still, because it's irregular, there's a good chance that unless you it it in just such a way, the front and back wheels are going to hit slightly different parts of said boulder, and react in slightly different ways. And as well all know, when the front and back of a motorcycle act on slightly different agendas, the result to the rider can be massive.
Now of course, I don't know how big this "rock" was, or what shape it was, or anything other than that it was a mineral deposit located somewhere roughly close to the Earth's crust. For all I know, the damn thing had been worked over by archaeologists with their little toothbrushes until it was an FMX ramp. I don't know. But as a general rule, jumping irregularly-shaped things equals bad, and the kind of boulders that one might use to jump often tend to be irregularly-shaped.
1/2 inch is fine, and actually I'd say any sort of gravel that's smaller than bowling balls is probably okay unless you hit it at eighty. However, I should remind everyone of the story of a rider we knew who had all his riding gear on, hit a section of five-inch-minus "gravel" (which can be seen at 4:45 in my "Cruising in Stereo" video, though this was shot a decade after the incident I'm talking about, so it's improved somewhat) and crashed his CR500 so hard it put him in the hospital. I don't remember what injuries he had, but after riding for 30 years, it was this section of rocks that made him hang it up for good. He knew he had a modern, stable bike with monoshock so of course it wouldn't hop sideways! It did. The front went one way, the back went another, and regardless of all the armor he was wearing, he didn't have a chance of picking it back up. Meanwhile, I'd gone over that same section twice on that very day, with a T-shirt, shorts, and 3" of suspension and didn't even come close to losing it. I recognized the danger, adjusted my riding accordingly, and was thus able to keep going and enjoy the thrills of riding for years to come.
Protective gear is nice, and as I've said before, I'd like to have more for the time when some other armadillo-looking goofball plows into my bike, but you absolutely cannot use that or anything else as a substitute for smart riding habits. Not even a little bit. When you're riding, no matter how much crap you're wearing, you gotta pretend you're on that bike ass naked with a full-body sunburn. That way, when you do inevitably crash, you will do everything humanly possible to make it better for yourself, and that, more than anything else you can possibly do (except for the all-important helmet) will save your life.
