It takes a more than a little prideswallowing to admit that you probably aren’t the cycling god that you’d like to be. Of course you can ride a bike – you can ride up stuff and down stuff, but you could always do it better. Anyone who doesn’t think they have room for improvement had better already be World Champion.
Fortunately, we chose to start our quest for improvement with possibly the UK’s nicest mountain biker: Nigel Page. And as well as being very cheery and approachable, he runs the Chain Reaction/Intense downhill team, races Masters Downhill at the top level and is also terrifyingly fast on a bike and ideal to teach this issue’s guinea pigs:
Emily and Sim, how to ride corners with style and competence.
You just sit there and steer, right?
Nigel spends a lot of his time teaching regular trail riders how to improve their riding and he has noticed that without fail, most trail riders ‘just sit on the bike and steer’. That doesn’t sound a bad way to go down a trail until you see Nigel riding; he’s all over the bike, pushing it into dips, leaning it dramatically into bends, lofting it over humps, jumping into the air and crisscrossing the trail.
Of course this looks like pure showing off, until you realise that he has got down the trail in half the time it’s taken you to bump off all the rocks, mince round the corners and bumble over the roots. What he’s doing is using the terrain to his advantage by letting the trail launch him over obstacles, rather than bumping through them, and when there’s a berm or a rut, he’ll use it to slingshot round corners.
Make me a demon, or minor deity.
Our ‘learn to corner like a demon’ day took place in a dry but chilly Delamere forest and it started at full tilt, with the hardest corner we’d see all day.
At the end of an earthy, downhill channel was a wide, slightly bermed left hander with a rut tracing the centre-line of the corner. Emily and Sim rode it as they would normally ride: taking it wide, cutting across the apex, bumping over the rut, and exiting at the far side of the corner. All very textbook. And all wrong apparently… Although they were applauded for their line choice – if it had been any other corner. The presence of the rut down the middle of
the trail meant that all bets were off and this was a corner that deserved special treatment. Even though the rut only had a built-up side on the inside edge, Nigel assured us it was enough to keep your wheel tracking a much faster line through the centerline.
Obviously no one believed Mr Page until he rode it himself, rolling in at a medium jog and, after a sound something like ripping cardboard, exiting at what appeared to be double the speed.
The Rut and the theory.
Nigel explained that the idea with the rut is to approach at a slowish speed that will allow you accuracy over pace. As the rut appears, your front wheel starts to trace its curve. The rider must actively steer the wheel round that arc (or they’ll get flung to the outside of the bend) while leaning the bike under them. The rear wheel will follow the front for a while, but will start to wander, wanting to climb up the inside edge of the berm. The rider must keep pressure on the bars to keep the front wheel on that inside face of the rut while his or her hips make a vigorous shift towards the outside of the corner, dragging the back end of the bike round and slingshotting rider and bike out of the corner.
Which is all fine in theory. When Nigel rode it, it sounded (and looked) like his was in trouble. Wheels were scrabbling and dirt was flying. He was leant over so much that if he’d slowed down, he’d have fallen off onto the inside of the corner. Yet it worked.
Now it was time for Sim and Emily to try… Both of them managed to get the entry to the berm dialed, but would get thrown out of the berm and towards the photographer after half a corner. Nigel explained that your outside foot needs to be down with all of your weight pushing the bike into the ground. Meanwhile, you lean the bike over far further than you think is wise while keeping pressure on the bars to get that front wheel literally scraping the inside edge of the rut. Finally you need to move your hips quickly from a position low and over the centre of the bike to somewhere over your right foot. This initiates a terrifying sounding rear wheel slide and magically lines up your bike for the exit of the corner, where you pedal away with gusto.
Sim was the star pupil of this corner, making it a little further round each time before getting shot out into orbit. Emily, meanwhile, was having problems with the whole hip-shimmy thing. She was leaning the bike into the left hander, but straightening her arms and leaning her body as far away as possible, afraid to commit, which had the effect of countering the bike’s lean. With Nigel’s help and manhandling, she was shown what the right position felt like to be in, and that started a marked improvement.
It’s all about trying things and, when it goes right, remembering what that felt like, then trying again and trying to feel that more. After another dozen goes, both Emily and Sim agreed they weren’t going to get any better on this corner that day without several more hours of practice, so we moved on to the next spot. The Bermed S-Bends…
The S-Bends of Speedy Doom
The next session was a well-constructed one-two pair of berms. A left hander into a right. Again, the riders were allowed to ride round as they would normally. And again, both looked OK.
And once again, Nigel thundered around the same corners, with the same run-up. He appeared to be almost horizontal, bike leant over, rider nearly as much so. Outside foot down and tyres pushed into the dirt. There was obviously a lot more speed and traction to be had here. He straightened up briefly, then pitched the bike in the
other direction, other foot now dropping to the outside to weight the bike. And that was how to do it.
Emily and Sim then had another go. This time, Sim showed the most dramatic change in attitude. Whereas before he was riding his bike around the berm. On his subsequent goes, he was ruling his bike. His elbows had widened, his stance was lower and his weight was shifted to the outside foot to keep the bike planted.
Nigel decided it was time to put a few things together, so made a combo of corners to ride. It comprised of a tight corner round a tree, an off-camber slope and then into an ‘S’ of rutted, unbermed corners. Emily rode with a speed and confidence she’d not had that morning, leaning on the bike and riding it, rather than being just a
passenger. And Sim, too, was hitting lines with a lot more precision than he had before. He also had started to realise that tyre placement in the corner was critical down to the centimetre.
The final frontier
The final test was another one-two corner, but this time with a bermed first corner, between a pair of tight trees, and out into an unbermed second downhill corner.
The technique here was hampered by a low stump on the approach that would clip your pedal if you weighted your outside foot too early. The whole shebang demanded some swift footwork anyway as you needed to quickly weight your outside foot for the berm, then straighten up for the twin trees, weighting quickly again for the final bend. With only a couple of passes, Nigel’s two students were getting the hang of it. Nigel then showed a more direct line that cut the first berm, but it involved a much sharper, subsequent first corner. This was aided by riding at, and up the face of the berm and, as the bike was about the stall, letting the bars turn into the corner. The momentum of this put the bike into a little wall ride and magically in line for the tight squeeze through the trees. Both Sim and Emily were confident enough to just give it a go and nailed it – to everyone’s glee (and surprise).
With that, Nigel had to leave, so we followed him back, weaving through the trees and cornering like loonies. We might not have been cornering gods, but on occasions, we at least qualified for one of the minor pantheons.
We had a half day with Nigel Page at his usual training ground of Delamere Forest. Given our experience in the short time Nigel spent with out, we can strongly recommend Nigel’s courses to anyone who isn’t yet a Trail God.
For more details, see www.nigelpage.com
