With the weather turned to rain and cold I was driving out to the property on Sunday morning a bit concerned if anyone would turn up for our coaching day. Fortunately, Trials riders are resilient to rain and the 18 x riders who were involved in the day made it absolutely brilliant.
I started the day with a description of 'the system' of basic rding technique, we then moved on to some 'core skill' development. In the image you can see the targets on the ground used to develop accurate lifting and placement of the front wheel. This training drill along with the riding up and down hill one-handed training drill were directly copied from what I did with Bernie Schreiber in 1986. I shared my secrets of developing good suspension timing with the riders which I will not divulge here, because we would like to see some more riders at our next coaching day later this year...
Assistant coaches Jason Cunliffe, Andrew McDonald-Smith and Darren Cresswell helped by Aki Nagao and Andrew Stacey all worked together well to make it a memorable day. We all ended up at Bob Anderson's Section 7 from our last event in May, at the end of the rain-soaked day somewhat oblivious to the conditions. In this area we worked on rock step technique and even some rock step combinations which are always tricky. I swear, all riders had jumped up a grade in their riding level by this point in the day. Jason and I just looked at each other and shook our heads watching clean after clean as many of the riders attempted the dreaded 'tripple step'.
I must me simulating the throttle in this pic from Denis Lovett. What, a petrol bike ! It's Ok, it is a Beta.
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