Episode #3 of my MTBSN podcast on Mountain Bike Radio is now available.
Main topic: Why learning track stands is so helpful for riding tighter and steeper uphill switchbacks.
See the show notes and links on the MBR page for Episode #3 .
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction:
Hey everyone! Welcome to Episode #3 of the Mountain Bike Skills Network podcast. My name is Griff Wigley, also known as the mountain bike geezer. I’m am the guy behind the Mountain Bike Skills Network blog and I’m the founder and host of the Mountain Bike Skills Network Community, currently a group on Facebook.
My intent is to have all three – the blog, the online community and this show — help recreational mountain bikers like you, have more fun while upping your skills. Why? So you can ride the stuff you want that challenges you. I think of it as a Goldilocks Zone. Not too scary or hard; not too easy or boring but juuuuuust right. That middle is where the fun is and one of the most reliable ways to stay in that Goldilocks Zone is to continually increase your skills.
You can learn more about the Mountain Bike Skills Network at mtbskills.net, which is a relatively new web address, a replacement for mountainbikegeezer.com which I’ve been using the past 6 years.
I’m coming to you from my world headquarters – a basement office in my house in the small town of Northfield in the southern part of Minnesota, a state in the upper midwest region of the USA.
In today’s show, I first want to talk about the importance of track stands — which, just in case you’re totally clueless, has nothing to do with tracks — bicycle, railroad, animal or otherwise. Track stands are all about staying balanced on your bike while not moving forward — and oddly enough, that translates to being more stable when you ARE moving forward on certain types of terrain, most notably, switchbacks.
After that, I’m going to provide a bit of a roundup of what’s happening in our online community. Women mountain bikers are increasingly making their presence known there — both in numbers and in participation — and that seems to be the main reason why things are a-humming and a-buzzing.
So stay with me.
Why track stands can help you get better at riding tighter & steeper uphill switchbacks
Back in February, I put up a poll in my MTBSN FB Group asking:
