Understand Small Obstacles for Mountain Bike Racers

Video Transcript

"Often times when you are riding a trail, you approach an obstacle that seems hard to get across. In this particular case, it's a culvert that goes across the trail at a forty-five degree angle. A forty-five degree angle tends to make your tires want to slip, so what you want to do is you want to square it off and go over it as close to ninety as you can. And you know, that's sort of like a curve. It's small enough and round enough that I can just roll right over it. I just push my front wheel into it, let it go over it, push my front wheel, push my back wheel down the back side. But, say it's something a little bit sharper, and a little bit higher that I don't necessarily want to just run into like that. I can, as I'll show you here, I can sort of pick up my front wheel a little bit pick up my back wheel a little bit and smooth it out a lot. So in this case, I pick up my front wheel and I pick up my back wheel. And for the most part, I barely even touched it. So I can do the same thing. Because it's round, I can jump up it like that and use it as a little ramp to pick myself up. So a small obstacle like that, you've got a lot of options of how to deal with it, how to avoid it. When things get a little bit larger, it takes a little bit different set of skills. "