It’s ben quite a long time since I’ve felt such an “all the gear no idea” ****t as I have this afternoon. Down in Suffolk visiting the inlaws and I thought rather than go for the usual long road ride, I’d take the BFe and hit the local jump spot. I’ve not got a lot of DJ experience, but I’m fine with big fast “DH” style jumps and gaps and most shonky trail side efforts. Quite happy with 4x courses, all that kinda thing. I was clearing a 25′ gap last weekend on my local trails.

So there’s me with by far the pimpiest bike, in by far the ponciest gear, not being able to ride a damn thing. I just have no understanding of how to deal with proper steep transitions and how to judge speed. 0.1 mph seems to be the difference between coming up massively short and overshooting massively. After an hour of riding I’d managed to clear one jump a few times, mostly by luck; had 2 humdinger stacks and was leaking quite nicely from both shins and 1 elbow.

Most of the riders were on BMXes although there were a couple of 24″ MTBs. Mostly they seemed to be rolling in really slow and just getting loads of effortless pop and height – even the 8 year olds. I know my pop is not great, but I have no idea how to improve it – normally if in doubt I just go faster, but that really doesn’t work on steep jumps. I don’t want amplitude to start with, I just want smoothness and flow. Then when you’re up, how do you point the bike back down to a steep landing? There were a couple of times I made the jump but just didn’t have enough weight on the front wheel to control the run out.

So how do they do it…?

Thanks!

Practice,more practice and some then some more.Best way is to build your own and gradually make them steeper.Its a totally different technique to just blatting at big rollers and dead sailoring to flat!!!When you really start pulling back and the bike goes light at the apex to nosing in to a perfect landing….thats trails!!

Most of the riders were on BMXes although there were a couple of 24″ MTBs

That says it all. I dont know what bike you were on, cotic? Fat tires, long travel forks etc. dont help at all, especially if they were bmx trails.

I dont know what bike you were on

Small Bfe, 150mm Revs, 2.3 Minion on the front 2.2 Crossmark on the back. Normally what I call chuckable, and the Crosmark was on specially to be fast rolling.

As far as the pulling back thing goes, everything was just coming too quick. Pump into the face of the jump, then I’d be going up like a bloody elevator. I just couldn’t extend fast enough to stay ahead of the bike, then my weight is all wrong to be able to push the front end down for the landing.

150mm Revs, 2.3 Minion on the front 2.2 Crossmark

Yeh not ideal. When I used to ride a mtb for dirt jumps I used 100mm travel forks pumped up very hard. Some smooth tires like dmrs motos pumped up very hard would help. Its suprising how much faster a bmx rolls on hard dirt compared to a mtb.

How big were the gaps? When I used to ride doubles (with smallish gaps) I used to do it a bit like riding a spine/volcano, whereby you pull up quite a bit and just go high then nose into the landing, rather than just going straight and long like you may be doing?