Is paying an expert to tell us our weaknesses on the trail worth time, money, and possible humiliation?

If you ride mountain bikes and happen to live in the PNW, you have likely done a search that looks like this: “How to get better at mountain biking for beginners jumps drops wheelies”. You may have even arrived on this page using the same exact search. If you put that same search string into Youtube specifically, you’ll come across Simon Lawton’s channel: FluidRide Mountain Bike Instruction.

I learned a ton just watching the videos on the channel. I practiced things like wheelies, manuals, and most importantly – S. Lawton’s “bread and butter” – slalom drills. I would simply apply the lessons in my alley and at a field near my house. Quarantine was my time to get skills work in as racing and riding at parks was generally not recommended.

While the videos themselves are great, there is a big piece that is missing. Feedback. Working on these skills repeatedly scratched my “I need to be working on skills” itch but I was never sure if I was doing them correctly or if I was actually learning anything. A few times I recruited Mari to look over my progress but she felt the same way. Sure, it looked correct but was it really?

Fast forward a few months to the holiday season. Realizing that I was always watching these videos and constantly taking the bike off the rack and trying the drills, Mari decided to gift me a 3 hour (!) private lesson with one of Simon’s coaches Adin Daneker. Adin was an easy choice. The first line on his bio reads “Adin is one of the fastest riders around these days, and that makes him the ideal Fluidride instructor for racers, Hard-charging youth, and anyone trying to get more excellent”. Well shit, thats me. I am a racer, according to older people than me I am “youth”, and I would give anything to be any amount of excellent. It helped that he was a firefighter like my dad and long time best friends.

After brief introductions and a review of my goals and riding history, he asked that we ride Boot Camp. He would follow behind me and we would review the technique at the end of the trail. Boot Camp is the “Warm up trail” leading into the clearing at Duthie Hill Mountain Bike Park, in Issaquah, WA. Luna calls this trail the “small rollercoaster”. Its a flowy rolling trail littered with berms and bumps. We made our way up the fire road talking about Adin’s Pro-water-ski past and nerding out on each other’s bikes.

Bootcamp on Trailforks.com

*Humble Brag* As soon as we got out of Boot Camp, Adin asked me if I had been watching Simon’s videos because I seemed to know what foot to have out on turns. After blushing, I confessed that I had been working on these drills. This seemed to excite Adin and, in turn, made me feel more confident and increased my excitement about the whole process. Adin found an off-camber section of the clearing and set some cones. We spent the next 45 minutes here, drilling left and right turns on a dusty, slippery, root-y turn. We learned right away that I am left-leg dominant and how this affected me. The instruction was to not bottom out the appropiate foot. If I was turning to the left my right foot would need to be used to drive the bike into the dirt to create traction. The opposite for turning tot he right. Over and over, getting faster and more confident as I went on. The conclusion was that I had no clue how to turn to the right. I am happy to report that, while I still suck at going towards the right, Adin and FluidRide were able to quickly identify this and teach me how to correct it.

The goal was simple: feel the knobs on the ends of your tires grab onto the loose dirt and not lose the momentum you had worked so hard to create.

Coach Adin would continue to confirm that I was picking it up quickly and he would increase the difficulty of the drills as we went on. After left and right turning, Adin grabbed his cones and he set us up for the Slolem drills; I had seen a ton of this on their youtube channel. He set the cones up on a gravelly section of the clearing. The problem with loose gravel is that if you are not properly leaning on your pedals, you WILL slide out. Adin went through his cones one time, talking me through the drill and then set me loose. The coordination was tough but I can actually feel the knobs grabbing the dirt and sticking me confidently to the ground. Adin would encourage me to separate myself further and further from the bike. No matter how tight I came into those cones, the knobs would grab and I’d keep that precious speed; I was addicted. I would do, something like, 15 rounds of these cones, faster and faster each time. Adin decided I was ready to spread them a bit further apart to increase the difficulty. I knew Coach Adin was having a good time too because he confessed that he wasn’t sure how it would ride but he would ride it with me. I followed his wheel as best I could and we would complete the section. We were in a pancake flat section of the park with 6 cones laid out giggling and cheering like children.

The goal was simple: feel the knobs on the ends of your tires grab onto the loose dirt and not lose the momentum you had worked so hard to create. In road riding, the turns are where you lose speed. learning to keep as much of that hard-earned speed is critical to moving efficiently. On dirt, its more important because of how hard it is to create speed on a shifting ground.

There was a moment where I was turning to the right and Adin reminded me to push into the pedal but not to bottom it out. “Push it into the dirt till you feel the knobs grab”. (He would make a clawing gesture with his fingers like a cartoonish monster). I felt it. It was fleeting but I felt it. The knobs felt like claws holding onto the little loose bits of gravel. It was a millisecond. I felt the tires fighting against my shifting weight. Half a second at best. I felt my body correct itself and the bike working the turn. At that split second, it clicked. It was about not losing that connection between tire and the ground. What came next was me chasing that feeling for 15 sloppy reps.

Next we would make our way back to Bootcamp to apply what I had learned. Can I remember to not fully extend my outside leg too early? Would I be able to alternate between by left and right leg through a series of turns? What about berms, do I even know how they work and what to do on them? The instruction was to simply try to apply the drills to the trail and seek out the feedback from the trail itself. We would stop about half way through to attack berms specifically. I rolled in confidently and instantly felt a difference on my approach. Particularly when it came to my right turns. I was looking for something I never knew to look for. I was -for the first time- searching for traction and finding speed.

When we arrived at the berms, I learned that I did not know how to ride them; I had been faking it all along. Adin walked me through the ways to read a berm and how to create good lines to maximize speed. Would you believe that riding them high was half the battle? A big strategy for turns is to apply pressure to the pedals through out the turn. The more pressure you apply the more grip you’ll have and all that equals more speed on the other end. More speed tends to mean more fun. We clipped in and pumped through to the berms. I botched the first one (right turn) found some flow on the next one and then BOOM! I connected the last three berms for the fastest ride on bootcamp I had ever done. The stoke was full on. On the next lap, I was to follow Adin and he would provide a master class on flow. No matter how hard I tried-I even pedaled sections- I couldn’t keep up. I don’t think he pedaled once. Now I had something to aspire to be.

We moved from the trail to the drops. I confessed that If I had ridden drops, it was by accident and he convinced me that it was a lot simpler than it seemed. He explained that going down a drop, regardless of its height, would be about applying the right technique. He taught me to sight the landing and the takeoff with cones. The drill was simple: knees forward up until the take off and then shift your weight back to nail the landing. I knew that the smaller drops would be fine. I could fake my way over those, but would I be asked to take on the big drops at Duthie? We practiced on the cones for a whopping 2 reps. Adin assured me I was more than capable. We moved up to the drops. The first one was a formality; it was there so we hit it. I faked it. He asked me to move up. Drop 2/6 is about 6 inches off the ground. Got it. next to numbers 3 and 4. By this point I was pretty confident but worried he’d ask me to do the big ones. Come on. I’m on an XC bike. Adin reassured me that he wouldn’t ask me to do anything he didn’t think I was capable of doing well and safely. We moved all the way through the big drops with no issues. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was taking off confidently off of a drop I had seen and chickened out of for years. I would go on to fly off the highest drop 3 or 4 times before it was time for jumps! I was stoked.

We walked up the last jump on the Luna Jumps Trail. Its a table top at the end of a series of smaller table tops. Adin explained the parts of the jump: the transition, the take off, and the landing. All of these with their own nuances depending on the status of the trail and condition of the dirt. One thing was true of all jumps, stay calm and it will all happen at the legs. Adin went up and showed me how it was supposed to look. I went up and tried. He saw instantly that I was absorbing the jump with my legs and arms instead of using the trail to jump. In other words, I was chickening out. He showed me what it would look like if I relaxed my arms and kept my chest up and allowed the bike to do what it wants to do. I figured I would just try it. There was lift. Not much but there was some. I wasn’t convinced. I went back up again and trusted my self a little more. A little more was enough to get a little more lift and then a little more and a little more until I was actually jumping over the “tops of the tables” and making it to the landing. Each time I would get a little higher and Coach Adin would some how encourage me while providing actionable feedback. It worked.

I arrived as someone who had been riding mountain bikes for a few years. I had even found some “success” in races. I had ridden black diamond trails in places like Moab but I had no clue what I was doing. Like the Great Buzz Lightyear, I was mostly just “Falling…with style”. All I wanted coming out of this experience was confidence in myself and my equipment. Working with Coach Adin, I achieved these things within the first hour. After that point, I would find speed in places I didn’t even know it existed. I discovered access to trails and features I had bypassed. I experienced flight when I couldn’t imagine it. I left Duthie hill craving to ride my bike more than ever before. Adin confirmed the things I knew how to do and polished the bits I did not. It was a priceless experience with someone that was out there having a good time with me. I highly recommend this class to anyone looking to have more fun on their bike.