Skills or Kit?

Mountain bikers often spend an obscene amount of money on their bikes and other kit.

It's not uncommon to see people at trail centres riding bikes worth in excess of £2k who obviously don't have anything like the amount of skill required to ride such bikes over the type of terrain in the way they were designed to be.

Maybe we'd all be better off spending less on our gear and more on our skills? John and Katie went to Scotland to find out the answer. (Ok they were getting married too but I'm sure that would have been lower down the itinerary!)

It's September 2009 and the weather is absolutely perfect. Myself and my brand new wife Katie are in the Buzzard Nest car park at Glentress MTB centre with Andy Barlow from Dirt School. Andy is the current Scottish XC champion. He's ridden BMX, DH and now elite XC. Hopefully we're not going to look too useless in comparison.

I'm feeling some mixed emotions. I've spent the last week or so wrestling with myself about whether we should be spending £75 each on three hours private tuition. I mean, I already have the Dirt School DVD. What more can this guy possibly show me, and more than that, will I leave feeling like that £150 was well spent or will I be kicking myself thinking of how much closer to that expensive adjustable seat post I could have been had I not blown our money on such a wild idea?

We begin with a run down the blue descent which is an amazingly well designed piece of trail. Smooth mostly, with twisting bends that zigzag you down hill in a way that inexperienced riders can handle but highly skilled guys like Andy can have fun with and take at serious speeds whilst looking like he's putting in very little effort. Later Andy will show us we can take lines that aren't apparent to your average weekend riders, but for now our coach weighs us up from behind. For a minute or so I hear tyres on the trail behind me. Then Andy drops back and tails Katie for the rest of the descent. I'll admit I really tried to go fast and ride well in the hope Andy would be impressed by my ability. I don't think it mattered one bit actually since he was simply gauging the level at which he needed to aim his lessons.

Exhilarated and nicely warmed up we head back up to the car park while Andy probes our MTB history and establishes what we want out of the next few hours. He's mega laid back and we relax quickly which is just what you want in this kind of situation. The lessons begin with another trip down the same blue section. This time we stop and cover cornering to begin with which includes braking and line choice. Andy shows us how to let the bike to move around under us making use of "the flow" which is about as close to "the force" as you can get in MTB. I'm impressed as I follow him down the trail and notice the Jedi master doesn't really need to pedal. I have to pedal like mad to keep up as he glides round bends generating all the speed he needs from the trail surface. Again we stop and this time we learn to pump the bike through dips. We're shown how to swoop through hairpin bends and exit them with maximum speed. We're told to look at where we'd like the bike to go rather than at what we'd like to avoid crashing into. The idea is to search the ground ahead and aim for the places we can generate plenty of grip. It all makes sense but it's not so easy to leave behind bad habits like breaking mid corner and looking at the steep drop on the edge of the trail to our left or the loose stones that threaten our tyre's grip on the right.

Eventually we leave the blue trail and pay a visit to the skills loop where we practice steps and drop-offs. We all laugh as Andy talks about the difficulty of teaching some one you are too familiar with, and how even he has a rule where by he doesn't offer his other half advice unless it's been asked for. It's great to know even some one who does this for a living understands this mystical issue we have with teaching our partners. Enough of the chit chat because time is running short so, its manuals and bunny hops next before I manage to squeeze ten minutes of the basics of jumping out of Andy as we come to the end of the session. There's a lot to take in and I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. It's at this point that I realise we've hardly improved at all. There's not been time to practice and practice until the pair of us are looking super slick. We have however, been given the knowledge with which to improve our skills. It's what we do with that knowledge which will count.

This is not about doing three hours with an outstanding rider and walking away better riders ourselves. Rather we've been given the precious seeds from which our skills can grow. Andy puts great emphasis on how much is going to be down to practice and how there are different levels of ability we may pass through and achieve for example, we are now at a point where we understand there are things we're not doing right which is different to before the training when we didn't know there was even anything wrong with what we were doing. With this in mind and a few good jumping tips under our belts, Katie and I end the session feeling pretty good about the future. I'm pleased we don't feel the frustration of having spent money and gotten very little in return. I see Dirt School's fee as an investment. We now have the magic beans with which, if we choose to put the effort in, will make it possible to grow our MTB skills to a more than an impressive level. I'm very happy with that. Maybe once I have enough skill to push my bike to its limit I'll invest in some of those expensive upgrades I've been looking at.

The founder of Dirt School is Edinburgh based Chris Ball, who can often be seen offering riding tips in MBR magazine and has an extremely impressive MBR history. Find out more at www.dirtschool.co.uk