How to Make Sharp Turns on a Cyclocross Bike

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: So something you don't see on, you know, mini mountain bike courses and almost no road courses are lots of sharp, tight, little corners. So let's sort of talk about, you know, how to handle these sharp, tight, little corners, these things where it's almost like you're doing a hairpin like a 180-degree corner. Course builders in cross love to build them. So I'm going to just ride this one corner over and over again and just sort of talk about a couple of different things. This imaginary corner is we go around where have these logs placed, around these two trees and then back around this way. So it's a tight little circle. And I started sort of talking about how we enter one of these corners, how we look through it and all that sort of stuff is, you know, something you can work on this in a field in the middle of nowhere. So watch my head position. Watch how forward I look ahead going through here. I'm coming in, and, you know, the whole time I'm looking out. I'm trying not to look at the camera, but, you know, I'm not looking to the outside of the corner. I'm not looking exactly where my front wheels is pointed. I'm looking all the way through the corner, all the way out. You know, I'm trying to avoid the, you know, object fixation, looking at something, you know, like some hay there or whatever on the outside of the corner because if I look at it, I'm going to go towards it. So the faster I go, the more I do it. When I'm just riding around kind of slow like this, it's not quite as noticeable. What I want to start to talk about, you know, breaking, some of the other things that you can do through these tighter corners, you'll see how important it is to look, you know, look all the way through and outside of the corner. It also helps when you're riding in the field to, you know, keep you away from any crashes or anything like that."