photo courtesy cyclewise.co.uk.
So this is a cool concept: a mountain bike trail built explicitly for mountain bike coaching. The Cyclewise Coaching Trail provides a place for mountain bike coaches to work with students without having to worry about other trail users bombing down and interrupting lessons. The grand opening is set for October 17.
Judging by the (overly stylized) photo above you might think this is just a wide, soft mulch-strewn trail for teaching newbs to ride off road but apparently there’s more to it than that. Cyclewise says this trail includes “3 berms, 3 table tops, a rythmn section, drop offs and step ups as well as a technical climb and descent” which should be challenging for even advanced riders. Seems like a good alternative to teaching yourself to land 10 foot drops by trial and error 🙂
Here in the US it’s not unusual for new trails to include skills areas that offer progressively larger and more difficult technical trail features but most are open to the general public. I imagine this idea might be tough to implement here due to liability concerns plus there isn’t really a culture of mountain bike coaching in the US (yet). As more and more high school mountain bike leagues start up this might change though…
via SingletrackWorld.
