How to Ride Motocross

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Rick Wilder, from Portland, Oregon. Third State Motocross and I'm former Team Green Rider Nineteen Eighties. I'm here to talk to talk to you about how to ride Motocross. Basically riding Motocross is can you ride a motorcycle? If you can ride a motorcycle we can get you into the Motocross facility. What you want to be able to do is have the stamina to ride ten, fifteen, twenty minutes on a very grueling track with a high powered motorcycle for the most part. You want to be able to have you coordination and your balance all working together simultaneously like you would be riding a horse or a bicycle. Only now it's you've horsepower under your, under your seat. What we do in Motocross is that we have to really position ourself throughout the day, throughout the event on where we sit on the bike, or are we standing, are we bending, are we moving to the front, are we moving to the back. All those things relate to the timing of the track, where we are in position wise is all related to the track condition and how we're riding through the system on the bike. Body positioning's crucial. For example, on starting gate, you're not going to have your, your weight over the back wheel, because it'll make you do a wheelie, and you'll come out of the gate very low, very slow. Maybe even over the back. You want to have your body weight up towards the front, center of the motorcycle. Once you get going you're going to want to force your body back to grab traction and take off down the straightway to hit a first corner. Get to the first corner you may be wanting to be standing up before you get there, sitting down quickly, then going over the jumps, you're changing your position there. So, a lot of motorcycle riding is balancing, coordination and where you're supposed to put your body. Because that bike only weighs about two hundred pounds and you're going anywhere from ten miles an hour to sixty miles an hour over dirt terrain's pretty rough. So you've got to have your positioning right. You've got to have your balance right. You've got to be able to be looking down the way you want to be looking maybe one corner past where you're at in the race. Or you want to be looking at least five to fifteen feet in front of you at all times so you've got, you know what's coming at you, because things come very quickly."