Back to Basics

After my poor ride at Stony on Saturday, I did a lot of reflection on what I was doing on the bike. In terms of fitness, I feel like I'm on a path of progression that will eventually lead me to where I want to go. In terms of my technical riding though, I realized that I really am not on any path to improvement, and that I am most likely just reinforcing bad habits with every ride.

So, I decided that I needed to start really working on fundamentals. With that in mind, I headed back out to Stony yesterday. My idea was to just drill the singletrack sections of trail with the focus on being smooth rather than trying to go fast. I believe that speed on the trail will ultimately arise from smoothness.

Stony is actually ideal for this sort of work because of the way it's layed out. There are several short singletrack sections, and it's pretty easy to ride a section and loop back to the beginning to do it again. The first section is known as "The Pines". It's pretty flat, not particularly technical, but the trail rarely goes straight, so its a good place to work on cornering. I went through it 5 times.

Here's what I found:

• In general, I'm not leaning the bike enough when I corner. The bike can corner a lot tighter and faster than I think it can. Feeling the saddle touch my inside thigh is a good cue.
• I have a twitchy brake finger. The only times I blew corners yesterday were when I decided to hit the brakes in the middle (why I did this, I have no idea, I know that this causes trouble).
• I have a tendency to sit on the saddle too heavily. This makes it hard for the bike to move under me.
• I'm doing a good job looking toward the apex at corner entry, but I'm not doing a good job looking at the corner exit as I approach the apex.
• I'm not shifting my weight from side to side quickly enough when I encounter a quick series of corners. This may be related to one of the problems above, or it may be seperate, I don't know for sure yet.
• My position on the bike is generally to high and too far back. Watching that freeride / downhill movie gave me a better sense of what good bike position really looks like. Riding in a better position makes everything else much easier.

The first two points I knew beforehand, but the rest were relatively new to me. By starting slow (much slower than I'd normally ride) and trying to really nail each corner, I quickly figured out the things I was doing wrong. I'd go a little quicker on each pass, and by the end I was really ripping. I'm not sure I should have let myself speed up so much, but as my cornering speeds went up, it got more tempting to really hammer on the pedaling sections.

It took me a little under an hour to go through The Pines that many times, and on the last run I started feeling a little tired and began to repeat mistakes that I had corrected, so I decided to call it a day. No sense in undoing the work I had done. I rode another hour on the road though before I left.

So, where to go from here? I think that this kind of "practice" riding will really work for me, but I think that for maximum effectiveness, this is all I should be doing on the trail for a while. This raises a question about whether I should do these last one or two MTB races this year. If I do, I'm concerned that I'll spend an hour and a half or so reinforcing bad habits, because I know that at this point, as I get tired, I will get sloppy. I'll have to think about that some more.