Day 1 - Training

With that he released us to the dry lake for some warm-up laps (okay so we rode flat out, it's a dry lake after all) and riding before corralling us together for the first drills.


Dry Lake - Training - some selected video clips

Video - Jimmy says: "turn tighter"

click on Jimmy to see the video (RealMedia).

This is a simple drill that Jimmy made us do after teaching us the various components. It is now one that I try to do any time I get a bit of open field area and some obstacles. Basically he set up two pylons and had us do quick turns around each of these pylons. The key was to initiate a rear brake slide around the pylon and also give a little front brake so that the front end would dive around the pylon. The rider in this and the next clip is Eli.

As you can see in this video when he doesn't like the line that you take (if you take it too wide) he'll go and stand right in the turning line which forces the rider to pay more attention and try to get the turn tighter. You can see the arc area where we were drilling is darker than the rest of the dry lake. Overall, I found this to be a useful drill that I highly recommend to anyone as a quick practice drill.

Video - Jimmy says: "turn tighter-part 2"

click on Jimmy to see the video (RealMedia).

This is the second part of the cone turning drill where you can see Eli make the turn tighter after a bit of correction from Jimmy. Compare this to the first clip and you'll see that the initial turn was wide and now he's making the turn right over the cone and getting acceleration away from the turn as well.

I think that this was Jimmy's goal with this drill. He wanted to make us put it all together. Acceleration, balance, braking, turning in, swinging the rear end around, and doing it over and over again. I could have fun with this drill for a while and while I didn't get it right 100% during the session in subsequent riding that I've done since the training I'm still working on it with some improvement.

Video - Jimmy says: "Watch David Earl do it"

click on Jimmy to see the video (RealMedia).

Fellow Chain Gang inmate David Earl came out to ride this training session on his more than off-road ready F650. He's a super nice guy and a gamer for any off-road action. Here's his 15 seconds of fame doing the cone turning drill. You can see him not get the rear brake slide tight on the cone and Jimmy's comments in the background.

 

Video - Jimmy says: "Watch me do it"

click on Jimmy to see the video (RealMedia).

One of the nice things that Jimmy does throughout the training session is ride everybody's bikes to give feedback on how best to handle the equipment and feedback to the rider on how to best do a particular drill given his/her bikes capabilties. this is just a quick clip of Jimmy taking one spin around the cones before he gave the bike back to David Earl.

Video - Barry plays around

At the end of the day we were released to play around in groups like little kids. After doing drills the whole day this felt very liberating and we tried to make the most of it. There was a area at the far end of the dry lake that Jimmy took us to.

This area had lots of neat short pitches that you could ride up and down. Most interesting was that some of these had fairly deep sand so it wasn't a simple process of riding up and down these ramps. As usual, we watched Jimmy pick some routes then tried our best not to embarrass ourselves while doing our Evil Knievel  imitations. 

Barry Plays Around - Video (click to play)


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