Fundamentals

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A nice quote I stumbled across recently. I'm usually pretty optimistic in the morning, especially if it's a nice summer day. I feel fortunate if that feeling doesn't get completely beaten out of me during the work day though. ;-)

The real point of this post is to talk about mountain biking fundamentals (really, the fundamentals apply to almost any type of cycling). I started by coming up with a list of what are probably "higher level" skills, these would include things like: climbing, cornering, riding over obstacles, etc. From this list, I boiled the skills down to three fundamentals:

1. Balance / Body Position

2. Pedaling

3. Braking

Of these three, Balance / Body Position is the most important. Basically every higher level skill is built off of good balance and correct body position.

So, I've been spending some time working on these fundamentals. I've dropped the saddle on my singlespeed and have been doing a bunch of different drills in my backyard. I haven't done too many sessions yet, and I haven't been out to the trail recently, so I can't say if this is really helping much, but it can't hurt and it's pretty fun. The most interesting thing I've found so far is that I actually can lift the rear wheel off the ground on a bike with flat pedals (leading eventually to a bunny hop). I'm just not very consistent with it yet.