In the greenbelt, the city seemed distant.

But it wasn't. The city was near, pressing in on all sides. The greenbelt now sat squeezed between residential developments and shopping malls and bounded and bisected by busy freeways. And developers wanted it, too. They wanted it all. The greenbelt was the Alamo of Austin, the final stand for nature; and the tree-huggers, hippies, hikers, bikers, swimmers, and runners would fight to the death to save it.

"In case you don't know it, Andy, suicide's against the law!"

Andy stood five-ten and weighed one-fifty-five; he hadn't been big enough for football or good enough for the skilled sports. But the first time he had saddled up on a mountain bike and careened down a hill completely out of control, he knew he had found his calling, a sport he was actually good at. Andy Prescott could stay on a bike. And he wasn't afraid to fall off.

Andy was that new breed of athlete: an extreme athlete. The kind of individual crazy enough to snowboard down a mountain poised for an avalanche or surf the big waves of a hurricane making landfall or ride a bike down a treacherous trail at breakneck speed-all for the adrenaline rush. And that was the payoff for adrenaline junkies, young men and women taking sports to the limits where there were no rules. Where there's just you and what's inside you.

Inside Andy at that moment was an intense accumulation of lactic acid in his thighs and quadriceps; his pistons were burning like butane torches. They had just come off a full-power granny-gear grunt up a two-hundred-foot vertical on the Hill of Life and were now running Mach 2 back down the hill, flying off low limestone ledges and skidding over crushed rock and swerving east onto the steepest back trail at full throttle, although Andy could hear Tres' brakes squealing like wild pigs and no doubt he was in full panic skid, digging his heels deep into the dirt as he tried to slow his descent. Tres piloted a top-of-the-line full-suspension Cannondale Prophet, but he was a bit of an Aunt Bee. Andy was anything but; he was bombing the descent on a secondhand Schwinn hardtail. No brakes. Pure gonzo.