Ruts & Loose Rocks || MTB Technical Descents: Practice Like a Pro #15

All right. Good morning. Good morning. So this morning for breakfast, we've got grapefruit sized rocks, which you're not going to eat because you've got a full face helmet and because you're not going to fall down. So doctor's orders right now, no falling down. So kind of what comes to your mind when you think about riding loose rock, do you have any context for it? Or I mean, cause we don't have a lot of it where we come from. No, I haven't written a lot of this. And when I have, I know I've been a little bit shy on it. Um, and I think this is actually going to be really great practice because, when I do hit something loose at home, it really throws me off. And what better way to conquer that than to get an entire hillside of it? Yeah. One thing I would say for you as a rider who does have a lot of experience riding in the Northwest is you've ridden in the mud a lot. Okay. So riding in the mud and riding where it's like chunky rock that's not supported, like loose, rolly rocks is really, really similar. And so I think that the one, the thing that I try to do, uh, to make that easier for me to make it work better for my bike and work better for my body is to open up my body, kind of actually widen my stance. So kind of like bring my elbows out a little bit, bring my knees out a little bit and give the bike a little bit more space because I know at some point it's going to glance in some kind of way that I didn't expect. And having that space within my body really allows me to have room for the bike to run without it running into my body and kind of like, you know, setting off alarms and making me kind of stressed out. All right. So let's go up and take a look. Uh, I'm sure we'll find a plenty of, plenty of stuff up here and I'm happy to, to, you know, work with you on particular lines and looking at things. We won't worry too much about like pinning your perfect lines. The first time down, we'll probably do a couple of laps down here and we'll take it from there. Okay. Awesome. Sounds good. It's getting hot. All right. So the, the hill basically starts out pretty flat here. Not a lot going on. It's kind of a fire road and you think, all right, not too bad. And it gets rowdier as it goes. So, what happens down here is we have basically two lines. There's a left line and a right line and some kind of tall grass, kind of hard to see the ground. All right. And you know that it's just a bunch of loose rock underneath you. So we kind of have two, two things going on that didn't make this technical or make the psychologically technical. And the first is that the ground is loose. The second is that in this first, first portion, you can't even see it. So you're going to come through maybe about 40 or 50 meters of, of kind of brushy stuff and just pick one of the lines. When you get there, just kind of open your stance slightly and try to relax. Yeah. I think I'll go in front and then I can look ahead really well. Okay. So I'm going to follow you down. Okay. Just kind of see what you're up to. Cool. All right. Let's give it a try. Yeah. Ready when you are. Take your time. So you're going to stay far left. Nice and relaxed. This is way within your ability level. So as you came down here, you had a, you had a nice line. I'm going to show you. Don't let your bike fall. Your line was right down that looking up down the right side or rider's left side coming down. And as you came down into here, what you got into here were a bunch of really loose rocks. So your line was right here. So you came into these loose rocks. Yeah. Right through here, which has nothing wrong with it. And what we can see here, I'll show you, show you your line here. It wasn't wrong at all. I'm just going to show you some options. Yeah. So your line was right down through here. Yeah. Through this rut. And what I really liked that I saw is that you didn't panic. I saw you drop into it when you were going a decent clip for your first run down. And I thought, okay, relax, relax, relax for you. And you did a great job with that. All right. So you can see, I didn't, I took your line that time. I think I can't remember. Maybe I went around, but you can see my tire marks here from before. Yeah. Okay. So this is an off-camber thing. This looks a little intimidating to get on. So what do I do when I want to move toward off-camber? What do I do with my body? How do I initiate? So you're standing left foot forward. Turn my hips. Turn your hips. Okay. So what you can do in a moment like this is you see the rut coming up here. You can see the rut right there and it's not terrible, but this rut, like let's just say this rut went on like the rut to the right does. Right. Yeah. I'm not able to get up high here. Most likely. That's going to be too off-camber at this speed. Those rocks are going to shed and I'm probably going to have a bit of a bit of a difficult day. So I'm going to come down straight down toward this rut. I see the rut coming. And right as I get to here, I'm going to try to turn my hips rapidly here. Okay. Okay. And that, that hip rotation here is going to allow me to get up around this rut. Now, it's not critical here. This rut's not a big deal, but if it rained a little more, this is narrow enough that your pedals could catch. Or if you start going down here really fast and you come into this mobbing and you compress there, you could catch your pedals even if they're level. Okay. So what I'm going to do here, knowing that is I'm going to come down, I'm going to turn my hips and I'm going to try to access this line. Now this line's really, really good. Your line down below was good. You took the weed line. You went through the, you went through all the little brush there, but we're going to try to maybe play with a different line only if it's comfortable for you. Okay. So this is more understanding about like, how do we look at something? How do we know what our options are and how do we give ourselves enough options and enough tools that we're not freaking out? Awesome. Looking up the hill here, you can see how you got your line. So that time, instead of the line, the last time that you did was leading right toward your feet. Okay. So you rode that whole dirt thing down there, not wrong, but it's a little bit off camera down here. You had to slow down a lot. This time I had you cross the rut just right up there. So this time you crossed like, you know, 30, 40 feet up from us, you crossed and then you were able to just let go of the brakes. You're like, you weren't there. But what I would like to do is to work a little bit more on your manuals. Yeah. I, I need a lot of work on manuals. Yeah. And this is, you know, for me, manuals aren't about coasting on your back wheel through like rolly bumps, like on pump tracks and stuff. Thank God. Cause I can't do it. I'm not that good at it. I differentiate. I call these trail manuals because they're like kind of like that. Oh crap. Moment. I get out of jail free card for you. This is literally right here. Two seconds. If this were a stage. Okay. This is two seconds because you had to break through here slowly and then get back up to speed. And because it's steep, I would say it's easily two seconds because you could come into your full speed manual through and you would actually be safer. Let's do another run. I want to get a, I want to get GoPro footage of you. Um, just so you can see what you look like. We'll go up to the top. We'll do another run. We're going to work that line just like you did. Okay. Coming into that shale rock up there, turning the hips to get a little bit of left turn, getting on that bank, coming straight through this natural line here, coming down through here. If you feel like you need to break here, go for it. Um, eventually we'll have you manually through here. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Nice and relaxed. I felt really comfortable on that. That was good. You'll see on the follow footie there, some stuff moving around in front of me. I was like, okay, I'll go around that rock maybe. Oh yeah. I was kicking up stuff for you. Yeah. It was great. Nice work. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for coming and meeting me in this hot morning to coach me cause it's, it's getting sweaty in here. I'd rather meet you on a hot morning than a hot afternoon. That's true. That's true. I'll meet you at the beach on a hot afternoon. Okay.