Skills Day with Ed Oxley

I have been looking forward to this day for ages, read lots of good reports with regards to Ed's training sessions.

There were a few areas I wanted to concentrate on, downhill singletrack cornering techniques, rock gardens (although my irrational fear of large rocks might scupper that one) and general thoughts on line choices and body position on the bike.

Ed had arranged to meet at Lee Quarry nr Bacup, this has recently been turned into a 8km red route and 1km black route mountain bike centre, although the complete lack of signage meant I drove around in circles for a while until I located it. The weather was akin to the second coming of Noah, fortunately it actually stopped just before we set off.

Lee Quarry proved to be an excellent location for Ed to show me some techniques, we concentrated on getting me more upright on the bike opposed to my normal ingrained crouch position when going downhill, this was a revelation when I actually managed to get my body up and move over the saddle instead of hanging off the back. We also worked on utilising a pump technique to generate speed down the trail, again a revelation and a skill I need to keep practicing as it will help my riding no end. The other skill Ed worked on with me that he said helped his riding were trackstands, hard to believe, but once attempted I could see how this would help, my feeble attempts did start to improve, this is something I will really need to work on.

We moved onto berms and rocks next, berm work was good, the rocks were a struggle though, I managed to roll over the qualifying section no problems, as soon as we hit the downhill section I just talked myself out of it - irritating - and a fear I would love to conquer, hopefully as I perfect the other techniques this might follow, practice makes perfect.

Given the weather (it's seriously exposed in the quarry) we decided to head back towards Hebden Bridge for a great lunch in Mooch and then hit some of the local fast downhill runs to practice more technique, namely Blue Pig & Pecket Well A. This was my favourite part of the day, really great mixture of terrain, rocks, slippy cobbles, roots, mud and water bars, I found myself riding over rocks I would normally ride around to ensure the best line and keep up my speed, cornering more upright, modulating my braking etc all in the name of speed and smoothness, really good stuff.

We finished our day with a nice pint of Golden Pippin at the Hole in T'Wall pub in Hebden. I cannot recommend a day like this highly enough, I learnt so much from Ed and now I just need to practice, practice and more practice.