It has often struck me as odd that for a sport that is as technical as mountain biking, a lot of us never get any instruction in how to do it. We learn from our mistakes, we make it up as we go along, we pick up snippets from mates and we maybe see the odd video of pros riding and see if we can work out what they’re doing. But we never get any structured coaching. It’s just riding a bike, right? What can be so hard about that? Well I’m conscious that my relative strengths tend to relate to fitness rather than skill – typically I’ll make up time in races on climbs, but then lose it again on singletrack or descents.
So in an attempt to make 2013 my best season ever, I thought I would give some attention to the technical side of riding as well as maximising fitness levels and getting a fast new bike.
There are various people around the UK who offer skills coaching services. They can be hard to distinguish from one another, so I wanted to make use of personal recommendations. Unfortunately, one of the options which came personally recommended is based in Scotland – Dirt School’s home is the trail centres around Glentress. But when I was put onto Firecrest MTB ,which is based at Aston Hill, just north-west of London, it seemed worth a try. Firecrest MTB is Ian Warby, an ex-racer himself, who has coached a number of successful UK racers. If he’ll forgive me for saying, he might not look quite so much like a racer these days, he obviously knows his stuff.
Ian doesn’t normally run courses in the winter, because it can just be too cold, especially for newer riders who aren’t experienced with being outside for long periods in bad conditions. And I suspect that’s a good call – the chosen day for my three-hour session registered a scant three degrees Centigrade, with steady rain throughout. I wore more kit than I thought possible to wear, but was still frozen by mid-way through.
In as far as the lesson penetrated my cold-befuddled brain, there was a lot of good stuff in there. Ian has his own system, which I won’t give away here. None of it is dramatically new or different, but it’s put together in a well thought-through package. No doubt different people will pull different things out of the course; the main thing I took away from it, or at least my interpretation, was “if in doubt, push”.
Ian’s use of an iPad to film and then play back snippets of my riding was an invaluable part of the process.
See how the work Will has done through winter pays off, by following our Cape Epic reports.