Bicycle trials pro Ryan Leech is launching an online 30 Day Wheelie Challenge course ($30) in a few days. I plan to take it.
Yes, it’s often heard: “Forget wheelies and learn a skill that matters: manualing.” But supposedly a wheelie is a good foundation for learning to manual as it gets you comfortable with finding and holding the balance point on the rear wheel, even though the wheelie is done sitting while the manual is done standing.
This past summer, I blogged about my attempts to get up and over the bridge rock at Lebanon Hills, with a follow-up post on whether it and other big rocks at Lebanon Hills require a full bunny hop.
When I rode Leb with Iowa’s Ken Barker in August, I showed him how I used a manual wheelie to get over the bridge rock and he promptly showed me that he could get over it clean with a pedal wheelie. I didn’t get a photo or video of it but it was burned into my brain, as I was curious whether I could do the same.
I did this week. It only took me 17 tries. Gah.
The problem for me was two-fold: 1) I mostly suck at doing pedaling wheelies (see Ken doing two long ones in my video of him at Ray’s) so I had a hard time keeping the wheelie straight; and 2) I couldn’t get the timing right for pressing down into the pedals and springing upward so that the rear wheel would ‘levitate’ prior to hitting the rock.
In my 90-second video, I only included 8 of my 17 failed attempts. It includes a slo-mo and two stills of the one successful ride.
I wanted to finish it up with a video of a manual wheelie over the rock from a rear view angle (earlier videos were front view here and side view here). I put the camera on a tripod in the middle of the bridge which caused me to slow down slightly as I rode by it. The lack of speed and lack of front wheel height on the manual was almost disastrous, as I nearly did a header right into the rock. Have a laugh:
