Editor’s note: For those of you joining us late, Peter Rubin’s a roadie making his first foray into mountain biking. He knows nothing — seriously, zero — about that side of cycling, so he’s chronicling his adventures in the hope that others might learn from his inevitable mistakes.
It’s Day 2 at Gene Hamilton’s Better Ride skills camp. After a day in which I spent close to eight hours in a parking lot and about 15 minutes riding on a trail, I can’t say I was all that excited about waking up at 7 on a Saturday for more of the same. But there I was (albeit in a different parking lot). And this time, we were learning how to steer.
No, really.
So here’s what you don’t do on a bike when you want to go around the corner: turn the handlebars. Well, kind of. Under 6 mph or so, that’s really the only way to do it. But once you’re going faster than that, wrenching the wheel in a given direction means you’re about a half-second away from kissing pavement. The front wheel will just keep turning in that direction until it hits a right angle and you fly over the handlebars. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself.
Done?
What happens, you no doubt noticed, is that you didn’t kiss the pavement. Your bike actually swerved in the opposite direction. That’s because your body, purely instinctively, counteracts what your brain thinks you’re trying to do. (Give it up for self-preservation!) All of this is to say that turning the wheel is not how you turn. The thing is, you already know that — at least, your body does. You’ve internalized what’s commonly known as “countersteering,” which essentially means initiating a turn in one direction with the intention of going the opposite direction. But as Hamilton, who founded Better Ride, and coach Dylan Renn pointed out, it’s not so much steering in the opposite direction as it is applying pressure in the opposite direction. That is, if you want to make a sharp left turn, you apply pressure on the left handlebar. That initiates a turn to the right, after which your bike will lean left to compensate, and you can lean into a sharp left turn.
Now, this is no secret among road cyclists and motorcyclists. But the effect on mountain biking is a bit more pronounced because the crux of MTBing is to stay balanced above your bike no matter what. From front to back and left to right, your mass should be centered above your bottom bracket. That means that if your bike is going to be leaning to the left for a sharp left turn, you separate your body from the bike and allow it to lean without leaning along with it. Which leads us, conveniently, to the Better Ride cornering method.
- Attack position. Always attack position.
- Look into the turn. Building on the vision drills of Day 1, we learned how to look at the apex of the turn as we initiated cornering, so that we’d be looking well past the turn by the time we were actually mid-corner.
- Initiate cornering via counterpressure.
- Separate from the bike by straightening the arm to the inside of the turn, and rotating the outside hand forward over the handlebar just enough so that the outside arm is bent at a 90-degree angle. (If this sounds confusing, see this image from Better Ride’s Facebook Page).
After lunch, we took to the trail (only five hours after the day’s class began!) and climbed through Pearson-Arastradero Preserve to the top of a series of sweeping turns. They weren’t switchbacks — that’s a whole ‘nother set of skills, and one I’d learn on Day 3 — but certainly tight enough that going through them with a good head of steam would press into service all the techniques drilled into me in the parking lot. Dylan stood at the apex of one, Gene at the apex of another, and we took turns bombing down through the turns. And then again. And again. Attack position. Counterpressure. Separate from the bike. And I swear to you, every time I headed down anew, my smile was bigger than the time before.
Making a Dirt Dog, Vol. 4: As the Bike Turns
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Making a Dirt Dog, Vol. 4: As the Bike Turns
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Making a Dirt Dog, Vol. 4: As the Bike Turns
