Most 13 year olds spend their time participating in organized sports, playing music, or hanging out with friends. But Time Warner Cable News reporter Tara Grimes explains how one Webster teen is taking normal to whole new heights.
ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- For some, soaring more than a dozen feet in the air may be terrifying, but for Webster resident and BMX rider Jayden Mucha, 13, it's just the way he rolls.
“I just love going fast and just looking down and seeing everybody,” Mucha said. “It’s awesome.”
At just 3 years old, his parents said they bought him his first bike with training wheels.
“The first thing he did was kick the training wheels and tell us to take them off,” his mother Laura-Lee Sullivan said. “We tried to explain to him you need to start with the training wheels and eventually you’ll learn to ride and we’ll take them off. So he got on the bike, he got off the bike and he walked it over to the curb and the very first thing he tried to do was jump the curb. My husband and I were like ‘what is he doing? Why is he in the street?’”
So it was no surprise when three years later Mucha took up BMX riding.
“We tried him in the things we loved first,” his father Jeff Mucha said. “He liked the difference stuff but he always gravitated back to BMX. He always wanted to ride. That’s all that he wanted to do was be on his bike so we supported that.”
On his bike he’s stayed. Three to five days a week, for hours on end, you can find Mucha perfecting his moves at the Rochester Action Sports Park, in his backyard where he has a few large ramps, or on the streets.
“I’m more a park rider, but it’s definitely fun to go ride out in the streets just having fun, finding spots with your friends,” Mucha said.
Now the youngster is reaching new heights. His gravity-defying tricks have landed him on BMXGroms.com, one of the top webzines for young BMX riders. His videos on the website are garnering thousands of views all around the world.
“It feels so good to know that people like watching me and they think it’s cool,” Mucha said. “It’s awesome.”
Mucha said he travels the Northeast and met the son of the website owner one day while riding at a park in Toronto. The owner of the website liked him so much he traveled to Rochester to shoot a video of Mucha. Mucha said he to one day become a professional BMX rider.
“Usually professionals travel all around the world getting to see everything, so that’d be awesome,” Mucha said.
For now, he just wants to be normal 13-year-old enjoying the highs and lows of what he considers is normal fun.