I Led a Skills Clinic at the Hurricane MTB Festival! And Nobody Died!

I have to apologize in advance for the dearth of photos in this post. As it turns out, it is really hard to whip out the camera when you’re constantly yelling at people to “get low! Lower! Seriously, lower!”

A little bit of backstory here: I spent a month in Hurricane while Mike was doing his completely worthless OB/GYN rotation there, and to pass the time and meet new people I glommed on to the weekly shop rides. Thursdays and Fridays were the ladies’ rides led by Dejay Morisette, queen bee of Over the Edge Sports in H-town. On the first Friday that I was there, she gave me a lift to the trailhead from which our ride was kicking off that day, and we got on the subject of skills clinics.  She wanted to offer a small clinic at their annual MTB festival for people who wished to brush up their riding after winter or, for beginners, to learn the basics before hitting the trails. Dejay had already attempted to secure the services of VIDAmtb Series, for which I am an ambassador and assistant coach, but Sarah and Elena were sadly unable to shoehorn the festival into their busy spring calendar between the Sedona workshop and the Beti Bike Bash in Phoenix AND the Trans-NZ Enduro.

“Well,” I said to Dejay. “I have my Level 1 Instructor Certification from IMBA. Let me see what I can do.” I sent Tricia a text message asking if she wanted to ride bikes and make some money, and she said yes.

End of backstory.

Two months later, Tricia and I found ourselves waking up at the ass crack of dawn to wolf down some bacon and coffee before welcoming the first twenty riders of a sold-out clinic weekend. We had decided that we could each handle up to ten participants per session, but I was surprised when, at the close of online registration a few days before the weekend, all sixty spots had been purchased.

One of the great things about VIDA clinics is that they include a morning skills session and then an afternoon on-trail session to put the skills in context. Our clinics in Hurricane were short—only 2.5-4 hours—so we didn’t have enough time for extended trail application. Nonetheless, we crammed a lot of information into each morning and even got to take some of the participants to a nearby trail to session a tricky switchback.

Here you go. The only photos of the clinic. Drink ‘em in.

When the participants arrived each morning to check in, I asked a series of questions to figure out which group to put them in. Although I was sorely tempted to utilize my question tree for determining whether a given individual is an appropriate mountain biking companion, I instead applied these queries:

1. What bike are you riding

      2. Where are you from

      3. How long have you been riding

            4. What pedal/shoe combination are you using

      5. What kind of trails do you like to ride

I mean, it’s not exactly scientific, but I felt like it should provide a pretty good idea of skill level.

I do have to note that there were a few cases of folks who had registered online and then showed up, heard that we’d be doing beginner and intermediate stuff, and decided to go ride somewhere else instead. It caused me to make a mental note to really spell out the depth of the clinic for next time. However, my first-glance assessment of the people who bailed had me thinking, smugly, “Ya sure, buddy?” There was a portable pump track at the festival, and I wish I had set up the check-in table right next to it so that, in the cases of people opting out, I could point and say: “Okay, if you can rail this thing faster than I can, I’ve got nothing to teach you.” I’m guessing that would have taken them down a peg. Or I’m just an arrogant jerkwad. That’s totally possible. But seriously: pump tracks are not intuitive, and it is almost as hard to teach someone how to use one correctly as it is to learn what to do on them. It’s a good litmus test.

Anyway, after everyone had checked in and I had appraised their skill levels, I sent them to Tricia, who did the bike check to make sure their brakes worked and their wheels weren’t about to fall off (fortunately an easy task, since most of the participants were on shiny new demos from the vendors at the festival). I gave a brief introduction of us and what we were all about, sent the beginners to Trish and the intermediates to myself, and got started.

The skills we covered were fairly basic, but the idea was to really drill them into the participants and try to get rid of bad habits, like two-finger braking and being way too stiff. Tricia and I both ran through IMBA’s standard body positions, bike/body separation, and braking skills as the foundational stuff on which we would build everything else.

One of the things that really struck me was the ease with which riders on the newer bikes, whether their own or demos, got comfortable with the body positioning and letting the bikes move around under them. The trend over the past couple years has been the widening of handlebars, which allows riders to get their center of gravity nice and low over the top tube of the bike, which in turn confers stability and lets the elbows and knees bend effectively and act as shock absorbers. In addition, almost every new bike these days comes with a dropper post, which with the push of a button gets the saddle down and out of the rider’s way. This doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but once you use one, you can’t ever go back to a static seatpost. I felt terrible for the participants on older bikes with handlebars narrower than their shoulders and old school posts that restricted their range of motion, because everything they tried to do just looked uncomfortable and, frankly, a little dangerous. Luckily, they were in the minority, and most of the riders were on nice new rigs.

It was also very interesting how each day’s group differed from the others. As I mentioned, Tricia had the beginners and I took the intermediates, and I think that my groups tended to have a little more range in skill level than hers, which actually made a lot of sense: “beginner” is pretty cut and dried, while “intermediate” can mean different things to different people. My Friday group included a cocky guy who was the “too cool for school” type, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to interact with him because none of the women I’ve coached have behaved in such a way. Something for me to work on, certainly, because he won’t be the last. Towards the end of the clinic we were talking about trail applications, and he and a couple other guys were telling me about a tricky switchback on the JEM trail system and how they had crashed on it multiple times. Later the next day, I came across the feature while riding with Trish and the Knolly Bikes guys, and while I could concede that I wouldn’t take a beginner on that trail, I didn’t think there was an excuse for wrecking there, or at least not after you learned your lesson the first time. So that’s me being smug. Anyway, there were also a couple folks in my Friday group who were the opposite of Cocky Guy, and had their minds totally blown by some of the stuff I drilled them on. Those people are the most fun.

The Saturday group was fairly consistent in terms of skill except for one guy who was on a super old bike and clip-in pedals that he wasn’t terribly good at getting out of. I wished I’d put him in the beginner group, but he said in his pre-clinic interrogation that he’d been riding for about twenty years, so I figured he must know a thing or two or he’d have gotten himself killed by this point. Nope. He tried to get himself killed during the clinic by failing to get a foot out of his pedal before falling over and smacking his shoulder on a curb. Sigh…at least it wasn’t his head.

The Sunday group was the smallest, and all women except for one guy. I had a brief moment of panic during the check-in process when one of the participants refused to sign the media release form, which just said that the festival organizers could use photos or video of the clinic in social media or whatever. Sarah had sent me the release form that VIDA uses for their clinics, and when I called her to ask what happens when someone doesn’t sign it, she was baffled. In all of the clinics she’s put together, no one had ever refused to sign the form! She said to just ask the photographer from OTE not to take photos of my group. Easy enough, but still…I wondered if the recalcitrant participant was in the witness protection program or something.

But I digress. The group on Sunday was by far the most proficient, and we moved through all of the skills astonishingly quickly. I moved them over to the pump track, figuring that they would pick it up pretty quickly, and I was subsequently surprised when most of them struggled and two of them didn’t want to try it at all. This was unfortunate because pumping is an absolutely essential skill for good trail riding; it makes the difference between just hanging on for dear life and working the trail for maximum fun and safety. I desperately hope that OTE brings the pump track back for next year’s festival! I could spend so much time playing on that thing!

I also hope that Dejay wants to do another skills clinic next year. I learned so much and I have a million ideas for ways to improve it, and with more notice I could partner with VIDA more effectively to bring in several coaches for different skill levels. Hurricane is an excellent venue for getting comfortable on tricky terrain and trying new things. I had a blast at the festival, and I can’t wait to go back!