Mountain Bike Trail Maintenance Technique
Trail Therapy
To the ear of those that don't ride it would be very easy to think that riders have something against the trails they ride. We talk of 'attacking them, smashing corners, nailing jumps' and generally 'ripping' or 'tearing it up’. We all claim to love the trails, yet from the way we speak it would seem as if the relationship...
Featured
Back Behind Bars
Although we would all like to think that we will always ride, come hell or high water (and if you are in the UK this winter you will have faced plenty of the latter), the truth is many riders will take a longer than normal break from their time in the saddle from time to time. Health, circumstance, workload, injury,...
The Bunny Hop
I Said A Hip Hop Hippie to the hippie, The hip, hip a hop, and you don't stop, a rock it out Now, what you hear is not a test I'm rappin' to the beat... and for those of you not familiar with the hit track “Rappers Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang I’ll crack on with this editions skill,...
Drop and Roll
Welcome to another instalment of our core skills and techniques feature, and as we enter autumn here in the UK it's time to tackle the subject of drop-offs. Dropping and jumping are two areas where the penalty for failure can be life-changing. When it goes wrong the classic outcome is an OTB (over the bars), here the typical reaction is...
All The Necessary Skills
It is true that I questioned to a reasonable degree what I was doing heading North at the crack of dawn, from my house in the Surrey Hills, home of some truly fantastic trails. After a month of 60+ hour weeks, averaging 5 hours sleep a night, the prospect of the two and a half hour drive ahead of me...
Contact Points
In this edition, we are getting all touchy-feely (in an appropriate manner) as we look at contact patches. No matter what we do on the bike from simply rolling along the road to ram-raiding a boulder field we have just a small amount of surface area in contact with the bike and the terrain. We are of course talking about...
Riding Ruts
Love or hate them, ruts and deep-scoured sections of the trail are something that we are likely to encounter at some point in our mountain bike experience. If you ride fall-line wild trails on soft ground or lap race courses in the wet then that narrow groove cut in the dirt will be a familiar nemesis that can end a...