Red Bull has come up with some crazy ideas for bike stunts over the years, but none have been like the Impossible Bike Obstacle Course Race, which features Danny MacAskill, Kriss Kyle, and countless other riders attempting to navigate a floating trails-style course. It’s like a mashup between Red Bull Flugtag and MacAskill’s Imaginate, or a bike version of Takeshi’s Castle.
I got a chance to chat with MacAskill about the video and to learn his secrets to riding skinnies. Spoiler alert: I highly recommend watching the video above before diving into our conversation.
The following interview transcript has been edited for clarity.
Did you have any input into the design of the impossible bike obstacle course?
Yeah. My friend George Eckleston was actually designing the course for Red Bull, and there were a few different iterations. Some were looking a little bit more BMX with ramps, and then there were some that were a bit more trials, and we tried to go somewhere in between. Something that was going to be accessible to a lot of riders. And then slowly it got harder and harder to the end. So yes, I did have a little bit of input, but not enough, as it turned out to be very hard at the end there.
Had you seen the course before you showed up?
No. Red Bull specifically kept the course a secret until we turned up on the day. They wanted it to be a surprise and to get our response, sort of a little bit like reality TV with real reactions to the course.
One of the things that makes the course unique and certainly more challenging is that it is on water. It’s floating and so the obstacles are moving and the skinnies in particular seem like they would be really hard when they’re floating in the water like that.
Having the course surrounded by water, did that make it at least mentally a little easier? Like, you realize that if you fall, you’re just going to get wet. You’re not hitting concrete. Did that change your perspective at all?
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that makes a course like this so much fun.
I mean, everybody can kind of relate to the fact that bikes don’t go on water. I think it’s something that people just enjoy watching. If bikes are going anywhere near water, there’s a potential to fall in. So, yes, in some ways it makes it more fun to play on when you’re crashing into water. But for me personally on this course, I was very dedicated to not going in the water because I felt it was a little bit — I wouldn’t say on my shoulders, but one person had to get to the end of the course. I’m not competitive in a sort of competition sense, but I kind of did feel a little bit of pressure to make the whole project work, because somebody basically needed to get to the far bank.
And especially the last 20m. I felt that my only chance of getting that last 20m was having completely dry tires and for the scaffolding pole to be completely dry. So, yeah, it ended up being really fun to ride though.
You stayed out of the water, but it looked like maybe your tires did get a little wet on one of the attempts.
I think the final 10 meters I got across the last sort of logs and then by that point was so out of breath you’re really trying to remember to breathe the whole way. Because a lot of the course, it’s actually harder than it looked to ride. Or maybe it was just the way I was tackling the course. Kriss Kyle made some sections look much easier than I did, but I managed to sort of do some other parts. But by the time you’re on those last sort of skinnies, the log and the scaffold pole, I had a pretty high heart rate, higher than I’m used to on the trials bike, that’s for sure. I was on the Nomad, so it kind of made it a little bit harder to kind of do the sort of fine moves.
Yeah, it was pretty clear in the video that you were tired there at the end. So, how do you prepare for something like that? Is it strength training? Is it more cardio?
I mean, I was just hitting that gym every day.
Haha yeah.
All I was thinking about was getting across the edge, to be honest. I didn’t do a great deal of preparation. I mean, I’m riding every day and although I am doing a lot more flying down trails on the e-bike, and I’ve not been doing quite as much trials just because there’s less good trials and loads of good e-biking where I live these days. But other than that, didn’t really do too much prep.
I felt that if I couldn’t do it with my current skill set, I probably won’t be able to do it. At least we had time on our side, we managed to have a few goes at it. We were kind of testing out the course a little bit before the other riders turned up as well.
So, I say it wasn’t meant to be a competition. It was meant to be just a bit of fun.
You say it wasn’t a competition, but also it was kind of a competition. So, I’m curious, how is approaching a video like this different from what you would do for Imaginate or Danny Daycare where you get lots of takes? Of course we see the outtakes eventually, but the end product is just like Danny doing it perfectly. But it takes you months, and then this one you just got one go at it.
Yeah, it was kind of what I would normally do. I was there just with the mindset of getting to the end and you just sort of do everything in your power to get there. So aside from having a little bit more time pressure than usual and more riders on the course, if other riders had made it to the end I’d have been stoked. I just sort of felt that my job there was to really just try to get to the end. If no one did, all this hard work would have left a bit of a cliffhanger. Not even a cliffhanger, but a little bit anticlimactic if nobody got to the end. So I sort of felt a wee bit of pressure to get there.
Spoiler alert: you did get to the end. And in the video, it looked like it was right at the end of the day. It was almost sunset and it was your last attempt. Did that help you, being in that situation where you’re like, ‘I’ve got to do it. This is it. Last chance.’?
Yeah, got to the end of the day with all the riders and it was just kind of like, we need somebody else to get to the end of this. So we just sort of kept on going. I did have a wetsuit on the whole time…
Wow.
What you don’t see is a wetsuit under my clothes. It was absolutely — it’s not a very nice thing to say — but it was actually soaking wet from all the sweat.
Jeez.
It was absolutely so…
You’re like, “Let’s get this over with.”
Yeah. Because I started really just trying to take attempts, but it was because you’re doing it for two minutes at a time and you knew you only had a certain amount of good attempts in you before you started getting tired out. The sun was going down and that always spurs me on to pull something out of the bag.
It was a lot of fun. I’d love to do something like that with a bit more height above the water, but you’ve got to start somewhere. And even that build is a crazy build to do. It’s a lot of time and effort that goes into building something like that. But having something maybe like 15-20 feet above the water next time.
That sounds fun. I would think the course would move a lot more too when it’s that high.
That’s right. I think you maybe have to fasten it into the bottom a little bit more. But yeah, for our sort of first concept of that project, I think it went really well.
What happened to the course after? Was it one day and done, and it’s gone forever? Did Kriss or anybody else go back after seeing you do it and be like, ‘Give me one more shot’?
No, it was all built on top of pontoons that were kind of modular. It’s quite a cool setup. I had seen them before. This was down near where the Malverns takes place, the Malverns Classic Bicycle Festival, and they’ve been doing something like this for years. And it wasn’t even planned. This was actually very loose that we end up doing something at Eastnor Castle, which is just over the hill from me.
We ended up doing it there just because Red Bull had a connection to the castle and it was a cool spot. We used these modular blocks and, I think you could probably go bigger and better next time, though.
I know a lot of mountain bikers aren’t really fans of riding skinnies, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re scared of them or maybe they just think they’re boring. You’re obviously very good at them. Do you enjoy riding skinnies?
I grew up as a trials rider. I’m here in the Isle of Skye at my parents’ house, and I used to have wooden pallets in the garden and have some fence posts or 2x4s or whatever you want to call them went between all the posts.
So that riding along thin things was always part of trials. I also grew up, very much looking at, the early freeride videos of the North Shore as well. I wish that the North Shore still existed in the same style with all amazing high ladder builds and all sorts of stuff.
You don’t see that as much anymore.
No, I don’t think so. I think it’s maybe people don’t want that on their land. When you start building such elaborate things, I think it gets a little bit more difficult. But that was always a big thing in trials and as a bonus, if it’s low level you’re not going to rip your rear derailer off. They’re quite low impact. You can practice along like a scaffold bar right on the floor and really kind of get your level up.
Compared with the guys that really do competition trials, my abilities to ride along these things are not nearly as good as what they can do. I just ride quite relatable things for the videos, like tennis nets and chains and whatnot, inspired by my predecessors like Ryan Leech and Martyn Ashton and Jeff Lenoski. They were the guys that inspired me.
That’s cool. What tips do you have for people who are trying to get better at riding skinnies? Do you have any secrets to share?
I would say the best thing you could do is to just set some really low-level stuff on the ground. It can be like a scaffolding bar, it could be a fence post, it can be, 2×4. It’s best, depending on what bike you’re on, to build something that’s lower than the clearance of your rear mech if you want to not rip your bike to bits.
And honestly, one session with Kriss Kyle, who’s an amazing BMXer and has done some of the most amazing things on BMX ever been done, his tire riding on bars wasn’t the best. So, we had a scaffold bar while we were waiting for the course to get finished. We’d be somewhere else and we were practicing a little bit, and it was amazing watching the progression.
And even the other riders that were there, you’d see, in the beginning people not getting very far and then you can basically just work away at it. It’s low impact on your body on the bike, and it’s just about trial and error and persistence. I think you can build up a lot there, and then of course you can take it onto the higher things that you find at bike parks and wherever else. Logs that are on the trails, whatever.
Yeah. It seems like figuring out how to bail safely too is probably part of it.
Yes, of course. And I do a light amount of front brake drag, which helps a lot if you are trying to balance because it keeps the bike… This would probably be one of my secret tips — a little bit of front brake. Not too much, but it keeps the bike in tension against me so I’ve got something to balance against. But that’s maybe my inner trials rider. As a BMXer, you might want to just be there free flowing, just letting it run wild.
Yeah. And you might not even have a front brake if you’re on a BMX.
Exactly. Even a little bit of braking does help, but front brake more, than back brake, the tires like to slip off. But front brake, it allows you to kind of feel the obstacle a little bit and not bog down in the details. Of course, you can also take the legs off a little bit but I quite like to try to do it with my feet on the pedals.
For me, I feel like when I keep my feet on the pedals, it’s done to the best of my abilities, whereas you can kind of get some extra balance if you put your front foot down to the very bottom. And then you can take your other back foot off or however you want to do it and you can use that to balance as well. So that’s a good way of doing it and making it more accessible. But the sort of level up from that is trying to keep your feet on while doing it. That’s what I try to do in my videos if I can. Although, if I’ve tried 300 goes, and I’ve not been able to keep feet on, then I’ll maybe take the one where I’ve had to have a leg out.
We’ve seen that many times. And it’s like, every time you do, it’s like ‘Oh, he’s about to fall.’ But you make it work which is crazy.
Yeah, it sometimes adds to the video. I can get bogged down too much in making things look as perfect as possible. It’s not like I’ve got great style, I’m not like table topping. I’m no Semenuk. But from my trials point of view, I like to take out as many hops as I can. I didn’t do that on this course because you’ll see me hopping on the corners. If it was for a video, I wouldn’t have been doing that if I had multiple days in the course. This was more like comp trial style where I was just trying to do it in one take. I do like that.
I think that’s what people like today. I feel in videos it’s just more authentic, more real. Let’s see the whole thing.
You mentioned that you’ve been riding e-bike lately. How does that work with trials? Do you do much trials-like riding on your e-bike, and does that help or make it harder?
Yeah. I feel like the trials riding definitely helps my e-bike riding, especially when it comes to technical climbing. One of the things I love about the e-bike is the way it kind of expands your horizons of what’s a ride. I can go out in the mountains and there’s hills and mountains around Isle of Sky that I would never have bothered going up on my mountain bike because I would have been walking across the bogs for six miles, hiking to the top, and the climbs are so technical. The descents are almost so technical that they’re borderline fun as well. Whereas on my Santa Cruz Vala, I can go and I’m riding up these climbs and I’m using all the sort of trials skills. It’s all about your feet timing and power turns where you’re kind of cranking, wheelie-ing, and turning at the same time, stepping up things. And that’s more like your classic trail riding. And I’m sure you’re asking about more like pure trials.
I’d say the Bosch motor is quite intuitive. I like to ride on eMTB Plus with the settings kind of default, though I sometimes play with the extended boost. And now you can adjust this. So if it’s really technical and high, then I’ll maybe take the extended boost down to a meter of overrun. Sometimes it’s easier to control the back wheel with one meter.
But yeah, I like the challenge. I mean it’s kind of similar to doing it on the mountain bike as the bike’s a bit bigger. So I would say the size of the bike is more the limiting factor than the weight of the bike. I can jump up the same. I think I can even jump up higher on my Vala than I can on the Bronson.
Interesting.
Because you can use the extended boost to drive the front wheel into something and the bike pops kind of almost like moto trials. It’s similar technique. but the bike sort of drives through that a little bit. It’s something I love to play with.
I’m literally living my dream. I love trials, but honestly, the e-biking over the last 5 years is like I’m out every single day. I feel like I’ve taken up wingsuit flying or rally driving or something like that. It’s like I’m so addicted to the downhills and also the exploration around my home in Scotland that it’s like I’ve kind of gotten into bikes all over again, So, I love it.
All that speed. That’s awesome.
Do you think you could have done the Impossible Bike Obstacle Course on an e-bike?
Yeah, for sure. I definitely think I could have done it on my Vala. The last part, to be honest, it kind of might have helped because you had to come to a standstill on that last part, but we were kind of debating about it.
You probably didn’t want to get that bike wet.
I mean, the way I ride mine at home, in the bogs and in the rain, it may as well be a submarine at times. But I was tempted to do it on the trials bike, that would have been a little bit more agile. But I felt like riding on the mountain bike and I chose the Nomad basically because it was the brightest, poppiest color and a little bit big for a course like that, but it was just a nice looking bike to do on.
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