Learn Wet Braking Tips for Mountain Bike Racers

Video Transcript

"So in any sort of steeper or looser conditions, it's a fact of life that even with minimal braking input, your bike is going to get loose. It's going to lose traction and you are just going to have to become comfortable with that. You know, the way we become comfortable with what our bike does when it looses traction in either loose rocky conditions or similarly in wet, muddy conditions is that we have to remember what the natural tendency of things to do when they are disturbed and on a hill is roll down the hill. So, I hit the corner and I hit the brakes. And all those rocks and stuff under my brakes wanted to slide down the falling of the hill. So, I just loosened up my grip a little on the handle bars (which is the exact opposite of what most people do when their bikes lose control; they tend to clamp down and death grip the bars or "white-knuckle" it and hope that pulls things out). But what you really need to do is let things find their natural sort of stasis; their natural way of balancing and being. And when you are in a corner, that's a light grip on the bars, a finger on each brake in case you need to hit them. And you just keep yourself centered between the wheels and just really get comfortable with that. And that's the sort of thing that if you have a gravel driveway near anywhere you live, you can just go out and try to carve figure eights in that driveway. Put on your knee pads and just get used to what the wheels do when they break loose and scatter around. Because, in a situation like that, you're going to, your wheels are going to break loose because it's just sort of pebbles. So, you just light on the bar, lower your center of gravity, distribute it between the two wheels. It's kind of like if you put weight on the wheel that is starting to slip out, you make it get traction. If you put the weight on the other wheel, you can make it slide more. So, going in there, I put my weight forward because my back wheel was loose and I wanted it to just get out there and I wanted to follow the front wheel. It's kind of like what I was doing when we were talking about cornering. I mean, that's a corner too, but it's also loose so what we do with brake distribution is different. "