Another Tunnel hill trolls session

 Andy, Paul, Alex and Jaime turned up as arranged and on arrival they said they are part of the tunnel hill trolls (hiya smiler and co!) , a group of riders whom I have coached members of before. The skills check showed me the areas that needed work on we then applied the body position, looking and footwork skills to the techniques we at ukbikeskills teach.

We began with the drop technique and used three different height drops to apply both physical and mental skills sets to. From there we moved to cornering and at first I demonstrated and they practiced on the hillside before we moved to part of a trail to work on basic pumping and carrying speed through one berm, soon another two were added.

 A welcome break followed for coffee and tea and we restarted by moving to the singletrack trail to work on applying the skills to multiple sections on a trail. Pumping, jumping, rock gardens, steps, and drops were linked to berms, off camber, switchback and flat corners. Any errors were now being self diagnosed and with line choice and braking adjustments they all became faster. A broken linkage bolt on Andy's santa cruz tallboy didn't deter us as he started using my own bike instead.

We moved on to a 6ft tabletop to work on clearing tabletops and landing on the down slope. One by one they all cleared the tabletop, much to their amazement and both Paul and Andy rode the gap jump a good few times too. I knew they were tiring but we were all buzzing to we moved to the original trail with the triple berms on it but this time they were choosing to jump or pump sections of the trail and everything all clicked for them. Nearly six hours since we began our session ended and a cracking session came to an end . Let me know how the riding goes and remember, today is day one.

High5!