Why to Walk Through a Mountain Biking Trail

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: When you get to a section of trail that you're really not comfortable with, something that's really rough that it doesn't have a clear solution, a clear entrance, a clear exit, clear lines through, get off your bike and walk through it. I mean, there's things that you can look for when you're walking through so to make it easier and safer to ride. So if we're looking ahead over here and pretend you're way up there and you're looking down to where I'm standing, there's all sorts of holes, there's all sorts of rocks that fall away on one side and stuff like that. So what you want to be doing when you're walking down the trail--walking down a section of the trail, you want to visually sort of plan out what line looks good. A good thing to keep in mind is like the way the water flows is probably the way you want to go, it's the smoothest line, it's the line that has the least resistance and stuff like that. So you're going to--see if you can figure out which way water goes then you want to look for obstacles that if you hit them, they're going to stop you dead in your tracks. Sharp obstacles, maybe things that are V's that are too narrow that your pedals will hang up on and stuff like that. So just walk through, get a good feel for the land, walk down and walk back up, all that stuff gets processed in your mind. When you get back on the top of the hill, you don't need to be thinking about all that stuff, just think about exiting the section smoothly and after you walked at it and looked at it and you get familiar with it, it'll make much easier to ride through it. "