Something wasn’t right. At first, he thought he’d pulled a muscle in his back. But how? Then his breaths got shorter and harder. Eventually, he was coughing blood. By the time Reg Mullett got back from closing day at the Whistler Mountain Bike Park in 2019, 10 hours from his home in Calgary, Alberta, he was in the throes of a pulmonary embolism.

A stout, shaved-bald viking of a man, going down like this was unthinkable. At 46, he seemed invincible—usually outpacing men half his age. He and Mark Haimes had set the Guinness World Record for the most cumulative amount of vertical descended on a mountain bike in 24 hours on his 41st birthday and he’d built a life and lore around never stopping.

With inexhaustible energy, he had founded Calgary’s Moose Mountain Bike Trail Society (MMBTS), through which he championed 19 beloved trails. He regularly stood on top of downhill race podiums. He was omnipresent in every riding scene between the Alberta foothills and British Columbia’s Columbia Valley. He opened up some of the burliest alpine rides in the Canadian West, with at least 30 first descents to his name. Reg Mullett was everywhere. So, when a blood clot moved into his lungs and almost killed him, it posed the biggest question of his life: Could he slow down?

Five years later, scurrying around his van in the parking lot of Golden, B.C.’s Mount 7, he appears mostly unchanged from when I first met him a decade ago. But time has subtle tells. He still has the same iconic Sprinter van (he was one of the first to the trend), but it’s rusty now. He’s still built like a linebacker, but with wrinkles. And he still has the same permanent glee plastered on his face, but with a set of reading glasses stationed above his Oakley shades.

He’s here, on a crisp June morning in 2024, to train for the 25th anniversary of Psychosis, an event Red Bull once dubbed the world’s most demented downhill race. Mullett won the Masters category in 2007 and 2008 with a time only narrowly behind seasoned pros like Sam Hill and Chris Kovarik.

There hasn’t been an open Psychosis race in 16 years (though it was briefly revived for Crankworx as an invite-only event during the pandemic). It’s a terrifying track, with a 40-degree scree chute right off the start, from which point—amazingly—it gets even steeper. That’s exactly why it’s always been Mullett’s favorite. He and Haimes ran the punishing 4,000-foot trail 27 times in a row on a wet August day back in 2014 to claim the record.

“I’m just competing with Reg from 2008,” Mullett says, coyly, while local riders from Golden, others visiting from Calgary, and a rag-tag group of old dogs orbit his van. One asks if he has physio tape. He does. The other asks if he can get in on a shuttle lap. He can. Another just wants to hear if SRAM’s new brakes are any good. They are. Mullett knows everything and everybody—at 51, still sponsored by Santa Cruz, he is the sage elder of the Rockies downhill scene. Blessed with the tender affect of a bubbly teenage girl, a disarming lisp, and the kind of soul-warming friendliness that only comes from Newfoundland, his magnetism is inescapable.