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Jen I and went down to the Jimmy Lewis Offroad school in late January, in Pahrump, Nevada. Went down two days earlier than when the training started with the idea of getting the cobwebs off after not riding for a couple months, but we only had one afternoon of nice weather prior to the first day of training, but we did get out on the bikes a little beforehand.
by , on Flickr
The day of the training was no wind and sunny with about 10 celsius for the most part.
We started off with some off bike balance drills and then drills involving the bikes turned off and stationary. The most advanced being no hands one foot on the ground and no hands on the bars standing on the pegs and trying to track stand for 5 secs or more. This really set up what his main teaching point seems to be and that is most riders mask their bodies imbalance on the bike by using more speed and throttle and are therefore out of control most of the time.
by , on Flickr
His big thing he kept repeating was that "all times you can tell if you are in sync with the bike if you feel you could remove your hands from the bars."
Next drills focused on hard emergency braking and a huge one for me that the back brake should only be used for control of the bike and never braking. The front brake is responsible for 100% of your braking effort and he proved this by showing when an expert brakes the rear wheel is actually not touching the ground. One of the drills involves locking your front brake while still driving in a straight line, this taught two things; when your front tire will lockout in different soil conditions and the muscle memory to recover from locking the front tire, great drill.
From there on in it went onto off camber stuff, steep descents under full control, hillclimbs from a complete stop, lock to lock figure eights, wheel lofting from a standstill with no forward movement of the bike etc.
by , on Flickr
The next day was supposed to be dune riding and applying most of Saturday's drills, but we knew the weather report was really grim to had actually spent the first day until we lost daylight to pack in as much as possible.
On Sunday it was 0 Celsius and raining so we opted out, they gave us a raincheck to do the sunday ride with whenever we could catch up. So we headed home and caught a great NBA game in Salt Lake City. Got to see Russell Westbrook get a triple double.
TL;DR Anyway blah blah blah. I digress. We came away with a lot of of useful bike drills and skills.
by , on Flickr
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2016 FE 501
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