Simon Lawton from Fluidride Talks About the Most Fundamental MTB Skill [Podcast #206]

On this Episode

Simon Lawton is the founder of Fluidride, a world-class mountain bike instructional school located in Seattle, WA. He’s helped riders all over the world in person and through his online videos. He’s also a tireless mountain bike trail building advocate and his nonprofit has helped disabled riders get back in the saddle.

I ask Simon about his overall approach to mountain bike skills instruction and he shares tips for cornering and manuals. We also talk about trail advocacy, favorite places to ride around the world, and how video is changing mountain bike skills instruction.

An automated transcript of our conversation is provided below.

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Transcript

Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my special guest is Simon Lawton. Simon is the founder of Fluid Ride, a world-class mountain bike instructional school located in Seattle, Washington. He’s helped riders all over the world in person and through his online videos. He’s also a tireless mountain bike trail building advocate and his nonprofit has helped disabled riders get back in the saddle. Thanks for joining us, Simon, nice to be here. So you were a professional downhill mountain bike racer for 16 years, and turned in many impressive finishes in that time. How did you personally become such a skilled rider?

Simon Lawton 0:43
that’s, you know, I mean, I wouldn’t say that I was that great of a downhiller, but regionally, I was pretty good. I used to kind of, like, choke when I got to World Cups and things like that, just kind of like a bit of a mental block. But, you know, I have had some good results over the years, and I definitely had a lot of fun the way in which I became such a skilled rider is really the same way in which I became a coach was just due to my own frustrations, of my inability to ride like a pro, and kind of when things really switched from like Mammoth Mountain Kamikaze, like racing down fire roads, which I was quite good at right off the bat, when it switched to technical singletrack, that was really when I had to take a step back and just kind of say, like, wow, this sport has really changed. And, you know, is this something that I think I can do? And really, what I did was I stood on the sideline and I watched riders, and I saw what they were doing, and I started to mimic those movements, and then basically created a vocabulary to teach myself. And kind of went from watching a few World Cups like that in person, and then came back to the regional scene. And just basically, you know, was, was at the top of my game regionally for the first time, at the pro class. And people just kind of said, you know, how did you do that? What did you do? And they said, Oh, I just went and watched the world’s best writers and figured out what they’re doing. And then during practice. Somebody said, hey, you know, you know, would you, would you be willing to teach me, you know, at the next race, during practice? And I, you know, I lived in my car. I had no money, and so I jokingly said, yeah, for 100 bucks. And he was like, Yeah, sure. So that’s kind of like how I’ve both kind of transformed my own riding. But that’s actually where my coaching comes from as well. I have no coaching certifications at all. I mean, there really, there were no coaching certifications available when I started. And so this has just been really it was to start, it was a bit of a selfish effort to become the best writer I could possibly be. And then as I started to realize that in actually creating, like, a base of techniques with my own terminology and being able to teach myself, I really started to realize, like, wow, this is actually something that’s transferable to others. And that’s when really excited about the prospect of teaching.

Jeff Barber 2:52
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it sounds like you didn’t have access to a coach or instructors when you were racing and sort of getting started. I mean, did that exist at that time? I mean, it seems like it’s pretty accessible, but it’s

Simon Lawton 3:06
pretty accessible. I mean, you know, we didn’t even have proper video, so it wasn’t even really possible to review your own writing. Yeah, you know, the Internet was still kind of a new thing in the in the 90s, when I, when I turned pro, I turned pro in 1996 and yeah, they even, like, the Internet was pretty new. There were no mountain bike coaches. I mean, I could be completely off base here, but I think I was the first technical mountain bike coach that I know. I think when I started this in 96 I think, you know, it’s possible other people were going and I just didn’t know about it. But so far as I knew at the time, I was the first one. And so it was an interesting process, because people would say, like, hey, what do you do? And I’m like, Oh, I’m a mountain bike coach. And they’re like, What do you mean? Like, I teach people ride bikes. And they’re like, Oh, I know how to ride a bike, right? No, there’s actually, you know, it’s, there’s a lot to it. And it was kind of lost on people at first, even though, within the racing world, there was interest to start, and that’s really how it started, was from teaching racers, and then now there’s such a strong recreational base that that’s completely transformed my company, because I teach mostly, mostly recreational riders, quite a few racers, but mostly recreational

Jeff Barber 4:08
writers, yeah. Well, how long did it take you to sort of develop that initial course, or, you know, instructional material back in the 90s?

Simon Lawton 4:19
You know, that’s a good question. I think really, I think really, what I started to notice right away was just that there were certain key things that writers were doing. And it was interesting because I didn’t have, like, in hindsight, it all seemed so obvious, like, Oh yeah, you know, like, I created the system, and I made this company, and I got these trails open, and obviously those are great places to teach. But like, in like, at the time, I was just bumbling my way through. I had no that was doing. So there was no sense of future with this. It was just kind of like, okay, how do I get faster? Okay, put pressure on the outside foot. Okay, that’s a good start. And so my first coaching, I mean, really, I didn’t have a system, and I still, like, it’s interesting. Like, I still, I mean, you can go on my web. Site, and we, you know, you could read about what what we teach during our coaching, you know, when we’re certifying coaches, what we teach them, that sort of thing. But it’s not like there’s a manual for it. It’s not like I show up with notes when I teach. I’m really just showing up in the moment. And really, most of it is about watching what people are not doing correctly and just getting proper movement going. So it’s less about like a whole series of movements. Even though I have put terms to movements, it’s like, I always tell my other coaches who work with me, I just like that. We’re more like filters, like we’re more like filtering out the stuff people shouldn’t be doing, because at the base of it, if you’re able bodied, then you can, you can make these movements. And so it’s not so much about covering up things that you know that like here’s this whole new set of skills that you need to use. It’s more about kind of removing physical and mental blocks that are causing to move incorrectly, or misperceptions of how one should move on a bike causing people to move incorrectly. Because there’s so much both misperception maybe, from things people are reading or hearing, but there’s also this very strong human reaction to fear, which is basically the fight or flight mechanism which blocks us from moving in the way we should and really, when I talk about people who are naturally talented, people who ride at the World Cup level, who have never had coaching, what they’re able to do is to move in a way as you know, much of the time as the fight or flight does not exist, and that makes it just so much easier for them. You hear those people who are really good, they’re like, I don’t know, you know, like, just go faster, right? But they don’t really realize that they’re doing something completely different, yeah, than most writers, which is basically, they’re letting them their energy into the hill. They’re letting their energy into the mountain, and they’re not guarded and fighting against it. And that’s really what the most naturally talented writers are able to do. They actually move into the hill quite naturally. And that’s just that makes everything easy,

Jeff Barber 6:51
huh? Well, yeah. I mean, it sounds like you are generally coaching people who have been mountain biking for a while, and maybe they picked up some bad habits along the way. But if you were coaching someone who is brand new to mountain biking, like they’d never done it before, what’s sort of the first skill you’d have them learn?

Simon Lawton 7:08
So I actually did that last night. I had a group of riders, and one of them was a, you know, somebody who had a lot of experience on the road and gravel cyclocross. I’m like, I’d ever been on a mountain bike. It was his first day on his mountain bike, and it’s pouring rain. It’s a good startup, yeah. So, yeah, I was, it was, he did great. I mean, it was, it was really exciting for him at a big group last night of riders who were kind of more on the endurance side of the cycling disciplines. And the first thing I teach people is a little bit surprising to a lot of people. You know, it really depends. Like, if I had somebody who was brand new to cycling, obviously, I teach them the control mechanisms. Here’s how you break, you know, the safety of it. But generally speaking, the first thing I teach people is how to corner, and that everything that I teach within the cornering, within the context of cornering, kind of goes into everything else. I really talk about, kind of laying a solid foundation, like it was interesting. I had this group last night, and they said, Well, you know, this private group had hired me. They said, well, we want y and z. We want to learn how to go through technical routes. We want to do this. We want to do that. We don’t have cornering on the list. And I just said, Well, you know, you guys are pinching the top tube with your knees. Your knees are locked out like you’re not ready to go through roots. You have to actually lay a foundation first. And so that that’s a super important element. That’s the most important element is having a foundation that a foundation that kind of liken it to to a house, basically, you know, like, if have a super solid foundation on a building, you can build a really tall building that will hold up in extreme conditions. But if you have, like, no foundation, you’re not building something very strong. And so really, my focus with my teaching is on building the most rock solid foundation I can and that starts with cornering. And surprisingly enough, I don’t start with body position. We do some some basic drills that put people into position to where they feel it. And it’s less about a like, remember to stand like this. I mean, it’s more. It’s more basic than that. I really just teach what I call, I call it throne position, but it’s just a standing posture. It’s really just a human standing posture, where we stand with a very slight bend in the knees so that our knees are right over our toes. It’s the same way humans walk, like if you took a video of somebody walking up and down like gravel piles or hills or something, what you’d see is that the human’s nose would be over their knees and their knees would be over their toes. It’s really how a human balances. And so this is something that is at the root of our teaching. It’s not that your nose is always over your knees on your bike, but there are certain things that you can see when fear comes in or when somebody’s new as they tend to push their knees back, lock their knees and get their knees back over the back of the bike, and that really keeps them from riding over the bottom bracket, which, to me, is the most kind of central and important part of the bicycle. So I start wondering, and get them understanding the role of the bottom bracket, the role of the pedal spindles, all the rotating portions of the bicycle, and get them starting to feel like this. Like usually, within 30 minutes they’re like, I’ve never ridden a bicycle like this. This is incredible. And so that’s the first thing I try to land. Is like, I. Uh, that’s partly because it’s a, it’s a huge jump in their performance. And it’s partly because then they really listen, you know, they’re like, oh my gosh, if this could happen in 30 minutes, what’s going to happen in the

Jeff Barber 10:08
next two hours? Yeah, yeah, they can trust you. I mean, and it’s interesting, it’s interesting that you focus more sort of on letting people understand that feeling. I mean, it seems like a lot of instruction. Can kind of just get in your head where you’re you’re worried about what you’re doing is my nose over my pedals, or where my knees but, but once you feel it, it sounds like that makes it just a lot easier, and it kind of clicks more intuitively,

Simon Lawton 10:33
perfectly said. I mean, so what I talk about when I’m teaching, and this is something I bring up in in most classes I’m teaching, is that, you know? I mean, there are a lot of different four to four main learning modalities, but however we learn, when you first start learning, you’re kind of in your analytical mind. You’re like, okay, like, what is this person saying to me? Right? How am I going to interpret this? And you’re kind of overthinking, and that’s, that’s just a part of the process of learning. And so what I encourage writers to do is, each time they pass through, I’m always like, saying, you know, maybe drive the need for it more or whatever, but when they come through and it looks right, I’m like, that looks great. And so I’m trying to, like, let them, I let them know that when I tell them, it looks good to feel what that feels like. And then so, like, say, we’re gonna we’re working on cornering, and we’re flowing down like a trail that has like, eight or nine turns in it, and they were kind of repeating it. I encouraged them. I just say, you’re going to be stuck in your mind, and you’re going to be thinking, you might push the wrong foot down. You might, you know, everything might be backward because you’re stuck in your analytical mind. I’m going to help coach you through those moments, make sure you’re doing things correctly, and when you start to feel that flow, I want you to let go of your analytical thought and move into somatic, kind of somatic absorption or response. So you’re really just bringing this sensation into your body so that it becomes the response you’re going to have when you’re in a moment that’s similar to the moment you’re in when I’m teaching you. And then I encourage those riders to bounce in and out of the analytical and into the more like the somatic response, the body response, more and more. Like, I encourage them to stay, to get more and more to the somatic end of things, and then to check in periodically with the analytical what can tend to happen is writers, you know, especially like more digital learners, they can get stuck in the analytical loop, and they don’t really get into that. They don’t really get the somatic response. So they’re just trying to, like, make a, like, a verbal checklist or a mental checklist when they’re coming down the trail. And that’s really not what we want. We really want to move into flow. And really what flow is, is the ability to do something so well that you no longer have conscious thought. Yeah, yeah. That’s, you know, we’ve all experienced that in one way or another in life, right? And it’s a wonderful feeling,

Jeff Barber 12:36
yeah, for sure. So if cornering is sort of the the base skill, or the first skill people need to master, what, what’s like a mountain bike skill that’s really difficult for a lot of riders to master for whatever reason.

Simon Lawton 12:49
Oh, cornering.

Jeff Barber 12:49
It’s also, it’s also the hardest.

Simon Lawton 12:53
It’s it’s the hardest to do well, and there’s so much confusion about how a bike should be turned. And I would say the hardest thing for most people to learn is what I call the front foot turn. So I would say most people really are, you know, a high degree of riders, or what I call back foot dominant. Doesn’t really matter if your front foot or back foot dominant, but it doesn’t matter which foot you lead with. It’s the foot you put pressure on. But most people will put their strong foot in the back and they’ll, they’ll have a good back foot turn. So let’s say I’m, you know, like I’m a left foot forward rider. My right foot’s back, and it’s my dominant foot. So they’ll typically turn pretty well to the left, because the right foot should turn us left. But then when they go into a right hand turn, they have a tendency to press that right foot by mistake, instead of actually moving to the left foot, which is the front right, you know, it’s a bit further forward, it’s a little harder to access. And so I’d say, even, you know, with my or particularly with very high level writers, like, like, very, very high level writers, they’re so surprised when I, when I show them the weakness in their front foot turned and and for like, new riders, they’re like, Oh my gosh. Like, I never even knew that that leg existed, you know. So this is really getting into being able to, like the whole idea with cornering. A big part of the introduction is the bicycle, you know, the bottom bracket, the pedal spindles. But the other element of that is an introduction of the fact that just as we have handedness, like right handed or left handed, or whatever, we have footedness, so we have this ability on one side that we maybe don’t possess on the other side. And so immediately, like right off the bat, in the first 10 minutes of class, we’re working on becoming ambidextrous with our low body. And what I remind writers is that it’s actually easier to do with our low body, because at least in daily life, we walk around on both feet. We turn in both directions. We can choose to keep one of our hands in our pockets, but we can’t choose to not use both legs. And so even though one is going to be significantly more coordinated than the other, you can actually start picking up coordination of your second, what I call your second favorite side. You can start picking up coordination of your second favorite side much more quickly than you with your low body than you can with with your upper body.

Jeff Barber 14:55
Yeah. Interesting. Well, yeah. I mean, I think I think some of our. Listeners may be surprised to hear you say that. I mean, a lot of people, it seems are, for them, the most difficult thing that they’re trying to master, want to master is, like, say, a manual. I mean, it’s something like that. Is that? One, is that even useful? And two, is that something that you would even bother teaching somebody?

Simon Lawton 15:18
Yeah, I mean, we certainly teach manuals. I think, I mean, there were so there to, just to go back to the footwork thing. There’s a reason people struggle with manuals. Let’s say I’m back foot dominant, and I go to, like, shift my hips rearward to start to try to initiate a manual, and my back foot goes down and back and sinks all the way down to six o’clock. Well, I don’t have any power in the fronts of my hands because I’ve actually lost it. Lost that power, that ability to create pressure in the fronts of my hands from getting unwanted rotation at my foot base. So, like, that’s a really common thing for me to see. I’ll see people out in the park trying to practice their manuals, but their foot, their feet are spinning around every time they try to pull up, and so they don’t have a foundation to move from. So that’s one, one thing with manuals. The other thing I would say about manuals is that that’s a little bit tricky for teaching is, well, everybody wants to be able to do one for one. And yes, they’re extremely useful in terrain. They’re extremely useful, but they’re not that useful other than to look cool, like going through like the parking lot or down the street. And people have this tendency to think like, I need to be able to manual, you know, like, for a mile, which, which is fun and it’s rad, but it doesn’t really like you’re not really doing that on the trail. And one thing that that I think is so much easier about teaching manuals in a more of a trail setting is that if you think about what a manual like, how it’s meant to work, anything you would want a manual for or over on the trail is going to pull you out of the manual. Yeah? So like, anything you’re going to like, you know, like, you come out of turn and there’s like, a branch down across the trail, like, Ooh, I don’t want to hit my front tire on that. So you manual into it. The back wheel hits it, it pulls you out. Or, oh, wow, there’s a big puddle, you know, I want to keep my I want to keep my kit clean, right? So you manual through the puddle, and the back end of the puddle, that edge pulls you out of a out of the manual. Or you come to, like a little ditch, and you manual through it. The back edge of the ditch pulls you out. Or, you manual over a double, and that second bump on the double pulls you out of your manual. And so what tends to happen is people practice out in the open, and they spook themselves because they flip over backward. So what I get people doing is I use what’s called a bump board. It’s the same thing we use for teaching featuring, which is hopping off natural train. We just have this board that doesn’t move, that’s, that’s, you know, maybe like, a half round of log that’s like, five or six inches high. And we just set out cones before we have people start manually, like, you know, like five feet before then they can scoot back to the next cone and start manual, like eight feet before it. And they’re actually practicing using a target. So they manual toward this, what we call a bump board, and the back wheel hitting it pulls them out of the manual. And so now they’re actually, like, they can actually look down trail, focus on the object they want to manual for, and they can manual into it, which pulls them out of the manual. And that creates, like a safety element that allows them to practice kind of freely, without that fear of flipping over backward, which is really like people start manually, like they might be learning pretty well, and then they land on their back, and then all of a sudden, they start guarding, and, you know, their ability to manual is gone. So it’s a, I think it’s a really important trail skill, but it’s a fairly advanced trail skill. I teach people to do what I call, I call it passive pumping, which is just letting the bike find the ground. I teach people to use that a lot more than manuals. I mean, I use it like far more in my riding than I use actual manual. But basically, when I’m going down trail, there are three, three key ways that I can deal with terrain. I can let my wheels stay on the ground. And within that, there are two things I can do. I can either pump and press through, or I can just let the bike move around its own bottom bracket, which is what I call passive pumping. The second thing I could do is I could manual through something which is quite advanced. The third thing I could do is compress into the front face of something and jump over something else down trail. So I could, you know, turn a bump into a jump, or I could turn a rock or a route into a jump, which is what I call featuring so those are really the three ways I can deal with terrain. And I would say that like, 90% of the time my wheels are actually on the ground, like I’m either pumping or passive pumping. And then some of the time I’m jumping something, and some of the time I’m manualing through things. And people are very drawn to like the manual and to jumping over things, right? And that’s awesome. I mean, it’s super, super useful. I use all three of these things interchangeably, but the the ability to like, have a really strong position on the bicycle and understand how capable The bicycle is going at incredible speeds through terrain is actually more important, like, when I’m teaching like that idea of passive pumping. I mean, the bicycle is the fastest human powered vehicle in the world, which is pretty cool, but what a lot of people don’t realize is it’s the fastest vehicle down a trail, and that is for a very particular reason. It’s because of the role that the rotating elements of the bicycle play. So, like my bottom bracket, for instance, I can use that and my pedal spindles. I can use the bottom bracket to create incredible cornering efficiency, to really change the direction of my front side body by changing my foot height offset the height of my feet in relation to one another. So it has this ability to corner like, like. Nothing else, and you get down, coming down a steep hill on, like a dirt bike, and it’s awful, because you can’t get your outside foot lower right, and you can’t really take a foot off the motorcycle because you’re going down a hill. And so, like, a bicycle is much faster, for that reason, going down like through corners, but it’s also super, super fast through what I call undulating terrain. So like rocks, roots, just kind of uneven, three dimensional terrain. And that’s because my foot base can remain constant. So my feet, when my feet are level, my feet can remain level relative to one another, and level to sea level, you know. So basically they can, they can basically be my foot base. It’s like, I’m standing in the kitchen, right? You know, bike like, do all kinds of crazy stuff underneath me. It can rotate around bottom bracket. And because I have pedal spindles underneath, you know, the bearings that are in my pedals that are under my feet, those two axles basically isolate the rider as well. So the bicycle can batter around way faster than I could ever think, push, pull or rock, root or whatever’s coming up, I can just let it, like, batter through terrain. And so long as my position is really sound over the bottom bracket, the bicycle is going to be free to move underneath me. And then those pedal spindles, again, are allowing my feet to stay level relative to one another, and Level Level ish relative to sea level, which is when you think about it’s really pretty astounding. I mean, you can go down a super steep like quick roll down, and your foot base isn’t really changing, you know, it’s kind of like escalator that comes down, you know, that comes down this incredibly steep, rough terrain, and the bicycle is able to find the ground underneath us and move around. And so it’s really a unique system. And I think that that’s probably, I would say that that’s at the core of my, of my teachings, is understanding the role that the bottom bracket plays, and the role that the pedal spindles play, and most of the corrections we’re making are based on control around those mechanisms. So that’s, I mean, that’s primarily what we’re working on. I mean, I have, you know, top riders from Whistler or whatever. They come down, you know, regularly, and they’re they, they just want to have the most simple instruction. They want me to watch what they’re doing at their foot pace. And they want me to make really small really small tweaks to that. And they always say that it just goes all the way through their riding, and that they’re just, you know, like everything changes with their riding as soon as they make these really small changes at the foot base, because everything is built on that

Jeff Barber 22:13
foundation. Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool. I mean, and it, for me, it brings all new meaning to the name of your company, fluid ride. I mean, yeah, imagining like a bubble level, you know, like it’s always gonna, it’s always gonna point up no matter where you’re you’re pushing it around, and that’s, that’s what water does, and that’s what you do when you’re on the bike. So that’s really cool. Yeah, and all your years of training different riders all over the world. Have you noticed any differences between riders of different ages? And I’m thinking particularly about middle aged writers, like, are they easier to instruct or more difficult because they’ve got maybe some some bad habits built up?

Simon Lawton 22:50
You know, I think that’s a really good question. I I would say that the writers that who are the most difficult to teach are the ones who show up and go like, I’m an expert. I’ve got 25 years experience. Like, okay, you got 25 years of bad habits. Years of bad habits. I would say that those are the hardest riders to teach, but once they buy off on the fact that, you know, like, I’ve had people say, kind of show up saying, like, Yeah, I’m an expert rider, and then they’ll tell me two hours later, well, that’s the first time I’ve ever actually ridden a bicycle, like, I thought I was riding my bicycle, but I’ve never ridden a bicycle until today. Yeah, and so those can be the toughest to teach, but everybody is super teachable. I mean, like, I don’t have trouble really teaching anybody. People have the ability to learn. You know, they don’t. You know, kids learn the most quickly, for sure, but then they might not be as interested in continuing to, like, keep working on fundamentals that are really, really important. And so I’d say that, you know, the base of my business is probably people like in their 40s, 40s, early 50s. It’s probably the majority of the people I see. I don’t know if that’s not necessarily true. Maybe something has to do with with my prices and things like that, right? So, but, but I would say that those people are typically like, the people in of those in those ages, or they’re really excited to learn, you know, they’re really like, once they realize, like, wow. Like, I thought, I thought I wasn’t any good at this, and like, I can be really, really good. And once that light bulb goes off where they’re like, wow, you know? And what I tell them, it’s like, yeah, I mean, you’re learning super well. You’re mimicking what the best riders in the world are doing, and you’re doing this within 30 minutes of starting like, imagine you can do if you just stick with this. And people are riding at levels like, I mean, I’m one of the fastest riders my age around and people, you know, approach are starting to approach my speed having started riding bikes in their mid 40s, and they’re starting to approach my speed within a few years, you know? And I’m like, wow, this is incredible. I mean, they’re actually, like, riding in Europe with me, and I stop, and they’re like, five seconds behind me. I’m like, wow, yes, your secret’s out. The secret’s out. Yeah, it’s really cool to see people, and they’re just glowing, you know, because they’re just super psyched at how fast they’re going and and how how effortless it is. And I think that that’s the big thing. Is like, people come to class, I get this all the time. People ask me, like, I had it last night, even where somebody said, like, look like I, you know, I believe in your teaching. It’s great, but I don’t want to go any faster. Can you can you help me? You know, it’s, can you still help me ride? Not really, no, because you’re gonna, you’re gonna ride faster as a result of riding better, but you’re not going to feel like you’re taking nearly as many chances. And the bikes actually going to be smoother, and the force of the bicycle when you’re in the correct position actually is going to reward you with a sensation of flow and of smoothness. And so I think there’s this general idea where we equate speed with risk, and really what risk is should be more associated with improper movement, really, as you go faster and faster. I mean, I always say this about the top pro riders, but the faster they go, up to a certain point where they break loose, or whatever, up to a certain point, the faster they go, the more control they have. If we’re in the right position, we’re creating proper ground force. You know, if you’re out of position, the first thing that’s out of position is going to make speed feel as though it’s the danger, and it is the danger if you’re out of position, because you’re going to have more ground force on something that’s not set up to handle that ground force, and that’s going to be perceived as risk, as like, Okay, I need to slow down. I’m taking too many chances. This is crazy, and as soon as you take that little glitch out of the rider’s riding. I call it racing, the speed ceiling. Suddenly they’re like, the top blows off what they thought they could do before. Because we’re basically riding to our lowest common denominator, like, whatever the weakest part of your stance is, whatever your second favorite side is for cornering. You know, whatever glitch or misgiving you have in your riding, you’re riding down to that level. You don’t have a choice, like, you might have a great left hand turn, and that’s like, sweet. That’s like, sweet, and then you hit a right hand turn, like, okay, slow. And then sweet, slow. And so when you get that to where it’s like, sweet, sweet, sweet, like, on both sides, you’re like, oh my gosh, the trail just starts to, like, rapidly fly past you. And it’s doing so with, actually, a sense of more confidence and control than you had when you were going, actually much more slowly, but with a weakness in your writing?

Jeff Barber 27:02
Yeah? Well, yeah. I mean, it sounds like for middle aged writers, you know, openness is really the key to learning new skills, and they’re able to pick up those skills just as quickly as anyone else. Do you have tips, though, for writers who are over 40 in terms of like fitness or injury prevention and recovery, is, does that look a little bit

Simon Lawton 27:22
different? That’s I would say, you know, I, I would say the main thing for riders in their 40s is education, you know, like, I mean, don’t skimp on, you know, if you find a good coach around your area, you know, or if you come and do coaching with me, or whoever you choose to be coaching with you, if you find something that’s really working for you, that’s your best injury injury prevention. I, you know, I have so many riders whose like, wives or bosses or whatever, are buying them glasses with me because they’re like, Man, I just don’t want you getting hurt anymore. They think of me like a lot of people call me their security blanket, because they can come to me and they can try things they’ve never tried before, and because I’m there to actually change the, like, the foundational root of anything that’s a weakness that could actually cause injury. I can change it, like, in the moment, like I’m changing people’s writing, like, so quickly, because if I see something that could cause injury, like in a jump class or something like that, I’m gonna immediately change that. Like, I see them hit one jump, and I’m like, All right, pull over to the side. Like, we’re gonna change this right now. And then we just change it. They’re like, Oh my gosh, I can jump. So I would say that that’s the most important thing for for injury prevention, is an understanding of what you’re doing well on the bike and what you’re doing what you could improve on the bike is being able to elevate your writing. Now that also goes down the line of, I would say less than like the ability to recover from injury as you get older is more about the ability to recover from fear of a past experience is even more important. And this is where education is, is, is so important. So basically, when if I fall, or if I have a close call or whatever, and I understand exactly what I did wrong, because I’ve been to a coach and I know, like, okay, you know, Simon told me, yeah, sometimes when I when I do this, I’ll push my inside foot by mistake, and that’s what happened. And, yeah, I went down hard, but I know exactly what I did wrong, right? And that rider is not going to have the kind of fear, even if they were injured, they’re not going to have the kind of fear that a rider who says, Yeah, I went out and rode my bike and I hit the ground hard, I have no idea what happened, right? You know that’s, I mean, we’d kind of be idiots if we just kept going out and throwing ourselves down a hill at that age and like, Well, that didn’t work. Let me just try it again. Well, that didn’t work, let me just try it again. Like, we don’t want to be doing that in our 40s, you know. So like that idea of being able to do something and being able to understand either why you had success or what, like, misgiving in your riding caused, like, an issue that’s going to take away that mental fear, and that’s going to really be the thing that’s going to keep you enthusiastic about grabbing your bike again after you do fall down, like, okay, like I fell, but I know what I did now, you know, I can’t wait to get my cast off so I can go, so I can go and do this properly, right? Whereas, if you didn’t know. What you did, you’d be like, Yeah, I’m gonna get my cast out, but I don’t really know if I’m gonna go back and try that again. Yeah. So for me, that’s the most empowering. I would say. One of the most empowering parts of teaching is seeing, you know, seeing people light up and understand this thing, but also having them have kind of a, kind of an academic sense of how the bicycle should be ridden so that they’re able to critique themselves as they continue to develop as riders, and so that they’re able to, at a reasonable level, at least keep fear at bay. Of course, fear is there for a reason. It’s there to also to help keep us safe, and so it’s a little bit of a fine line dance around that, but, but I would say that that’s the thing that causes most people to fall. Most falls are actually causing fear, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, even at the highest level. Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting thing. But, yeah, I’d say that that’s amazing. So I don’t focus too much. I mean, like, I do a lot of yoga, and always tell I always encourage people to practice yoga, because it’s the best thing for injury prevention, in terms of, like, the physical, physicality of your body. It’s the best thing for creating the equality between both sides of the body that I’ve experienced, you know, because you’re doing poses with your left side and your right side right equally. It’s, you know, so you’ve got strength, flexibility, coordination, all these things, and then the ability to recover from injuries, I think, is greatly enhanced with yoga. But I would say that that’s probably my go to, like a good diet. I eat super well. I practice yoga. Those are, those are all good things, and a little bit more on the woo, woo side of thing, things, I practice a lot of pranayama as well. So a lot of breath. I do a lot of breath work. And I really find that that can be a super grounding thing for people, because one of the things that happens when we have a lot of fears, we have chemical changes in our body, things that happen that we can’t we don’t perceive as be ourselves, as being able to control, and when, in fact, we actually can control them through breath, which is something that’s been, like, kind of a passion of mine now for 10 or 15 years, and something I, you know, that was really like, I I always believed in it. I practiced it, and I started freediving about five or six years ago, and that was really when I was like, wow. Breath is super, super incredible. It’s really like the foundation of our ability to calm our parasympathetic nervous system, which is kind of like what creates that sense of anxiety and the fight or flight mechanism and all that kind

Jeff Barber 32:21
of stuff. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Well, your work with fluid ride has taken you all over the world, and your company, I believe, even offers mountain bike tours in various places around the globe. So what’s your personal favorite place to ride?

Simon Lawton 32:36
I love the French Alps. I love riding in Chamonix. It’s so good, it’s so cool, because it’s really varied. I’ve got the guys who guide for me over there have become, you know, really close friends of mine, and they’ve just shown me a kind of, like, a whole nother world of just kind of natural riding, which I really, really love. The mountains are pretty raw over there, so the riding in the valley is quite steep, but it’s, it’s varied. You can go down out of the base of the valley and find less steep stuff. And, you know, maybe, if it’s, if it’s Mont Blanc, right there, there’s a lot of weather that’s caused by the size of the mountains there. If the if we’re having, like, really inclement weather in the valley, we can pop through the tunnel into Aosta Valley in Italy. So you just go into Mont Blanc, and 10 miles later, you’re like, boom, oh, it’s like, it’s like, you’re not a desert, but you’re like, in an arid environment, it’s sunny, it’s warm, and you know, so it’s really, like, topographically, it’s very varied in that area within a one hour drive. And so I absolutely love riding there, because I feel like, if I go there for a week, that I just experienced diversity, like riding in the valley, or then riding in Italy, and then maybe, if it’s really hot and dry, we go and ride some nice steep slopes over in Switzerland, which is the dirt in those areas is very different than the dirt in the valley. So I feel like that, like all that variety and just the views and just the splendor of the Alps, you know, like, that’s, that’s definitely one of my favorite places to ride cool then, you know, we also have tours in finale, the gore, and I’ve only been there now this is, this is my second time there. We just came back about a month ago from finale, and it’s incredible there. You know, they have the AWS races there. A lot of people perceive it as being super Rocky. They’re all the famous pictures are right by the ocean where it’s really rocky, but you get up high in the mountains there, we have a amazing guide, Louise Paulin, is our guide there, and she has access to four wheel drives and takes you, like, to where the trails are not beaten up. So we have, you know, like a nine passenger Range Rover, and we go up there and get up to where the trails are super loamy. And it’s just incredible. So just, it’s more, kind of reminds me a little bit of the Pacific Northwest. And of course, the riding here in Seattle is amazing now. So, yeah, pretty spoiled for sure. Yeah, we’re just, it’s, it’s totally world class here. So for sure, great trails everywhere. And I love riding in South America. I spent a lot of time riding in the Andes as well. We’ve, we’ve not put on a tour there yet, but I think I’ve been there six or seven times, and that’s a totally different experience as well. They call it like in the area, we ride a lot. They call it the anti grip. It’s not. It’s not very, really like the Northwest. So it’s, it’s a bit of a wake up call, but it’s, it’s stunning and just completely different to be in those huge, huge mountains,

Jeff Barber 35:07
yeah, well, yeah. I mean, you mentioned Seattle, and you played a big role in establishing the i Five colonnade Mountain Bike Park, which is a really unique riding spot located underneath a highway overpass. So how did that project come together, and what were some of the challenges that you guys faced?

Simon Lawton 35:26
Yeah, so it’s interesting again, in retrospect, to look back at it, because there was no foresight. Like, I had no idea what I was doing, but I used to basically, there’s like 10 lanes of traffic right by right by downtown Seattle. There’s like 10 lanes of highway, including the on ramps and off ramps and everything. And there’s this big open dirt space where it was kind of gross. Like, a lot of, you know, people camped and lived down there. It was kind of dirt. Was kind of yucky. But I saw that there was no place to ride. There was, like, literally no place to ride in the Seattle area. It was, like, one trail. This is in the 90s. And so I used to go, I lived nearby that freeway, and so I used to ride over there. And I’d like, make some berms in this gross dirt, and like, try to, like, do a little bit of practice. And one day I was coming out of my house, and this, this guy, this neighbor guy, he said, Hey, you know, have you ever seen that space that’s underneath I five? Because he saw me going out my bike, and I said, I’m actually heading to right over there now. And he said, If you ever thought making that, about making that into a mountain bike park? And I’m like, Yeah, every day, but that Yeah? And he and he said, Well, I’m actually the count. I’m the East Lake, which is like, kind of the little area I lived, and he said, I’m the East Lake like, council chair or something. I don’t know he was politically involved. And he said, I can help you make that happen if you want to. And I was kind of like, really, so, so basically, his name is Chris Lehman, and he pushed me in the right direction for my first meeting. And that just went on for years. He just kept saying, like, Okay, now go to this. Okay, now go to this meeting. Now go to that meeting. And he just like, I had no idea what I was doing. Yeah, I had zero idea, like, of what would actually come and then the pro parks levy came up, where Seattle voters, I don’t even know what year that was obviously like, could be totally wrong. They’re like, 2004 ish, something like that. Seattle voters basically approved this big parks Levy, which paid, which put a bunch of money aside to create parks, but it also put money aside for displaced people, for the homeless people. They were going to built a lot more shower spaces and things like that, because people would be displaced as parks. And so I was able to somehow, in some bumbling way, secure, 1.9 $1.88 million from from the city of Seattle. Like, it seemed kind of surreal. I’m like, is this really real? Like, I don’t really know what to do with this. And like, it seemed like it was going to happen. And so I walked into an evergreen meeting, which evergreen is our nonprofit in the area, and they’re just an amazing, amazing crew of people. It was back then it was called the backcountry bicycle trails club. And so I went into a meeting and I said, like, Hey, I think I’ve got this thing approved for this park. I don’t really know what it is, but I think it’s like, it’s almost $2 million do you guys want $2 million and, you know, at the time they’re, I think their operating budget was $35,000 they’re there. You know, even, like, the head of the board was unpaid. There was there were no paid spots there. And the executive director at the time was John Kennedy, and see somebody I’ve gone on to have quite a long relationship with. And so I basically, they said, Yeah, of course, we want to do that. So they took that over, just using volunteer labor, they started to put it together. And with that money, they they took their lead trail builder, Mike Westra, who’s still there. He’s still in charge of, he doesn’t actually shovel dirt anymore, but he’s in charge of all the builders now. They actually gave him a paid position. And I think they started paying the executive director a little bit, and that was kind of the beginning of of evergreen, really becoming what it is today, which is, you know, there’s highly powered, highly funded force. I mean, there are such incredible workers. I was on the board of directors for like, three, three or four years, and I stepped down, like, due to gross incompetence, because I was, like, people are talking about, they’re so, like, savvy when it comes to politics and grants and, you know, just a whole nother world from the world that I live in. And they’re really amazing to watch them navigate. So that’s kind of how colonnade came to be. Was just this through this stumbling process of not having a place to ride. And people said, you know, I don’t think that’s going to last very long, you know, because it’s underneath. I five, and I said, you know, this isn’t about this park. This is about gaining traction with the community, and having the community see that when we ask for volunteers that like hundreds of people come out, which is what happened, and that’s really what was the springboard for duty Hill Park, which I played a part in as well. And with that, I still kind of like I was kind of a disbelief that they let us build this park under i Five. I still had no idea that we could have actual legitimate trails in the, in the, you know, out the wild, like on DNR land, yeah, stuff like that. That didn’t even cross my mind, like that. That was like pie in the sky. That’s never gonna happen, you know,

Jeff Barber 39:50
right, right? Nobody needs the land under the highway. But yeah, exactly different story when you’re talking about a park.

Simon Lawton 39:58
Yeah? So I was. Bugging the powers that be at King County, which is the big county that Seattle is a part of. I was bugging the powers that be to try to, like, let us take a small piece of each of the existing parks in downtown Seattle and make like, a pump track here, and a single track there, and a dirt jump here, you know, like, kind of like, so you could ride around the city of Seattle, and you could hit all these mountain bike spots, because it never occurred to me to actually have real mountain biking and biking. And after bugging, bugging the guy from King County for years, one day he just, he called me up and he said, Hey, I think I’ve got something for you. And he said, meet me out in Issaquah. Like, okay, so let him out there. We walked up through this, all these brambles, into this beautiful green space with big trees and everything. And he’s like, what kind of more lesson you know? Will you leave me alone if I give you this land? I said, Yeah, for a while probably, you know, so that that was something that was immediately handed over to Evergreen, like I didn’t, I didn’t even finish the process there. I think evergreen, you know, really took the reins on that and finished that out. And I think that that was a very similar amount of money that they were able to get there. I don’t, I don’t really know the details of it, but I remember when he showed me around, I thought, well, it’s kind of flat, you know, I came from, I came from a downhill background, like, 130 feet of verticality, and whatever Green has done with it defies, defies gravity, yeah. I mean, it is. It’s amazing. Like, you can, like, flow down these trails, and the pedal up is, like, one minute and two minutes, you know, back to the top, and you’re like, Wow, this is, like, as much descending as it is climbing, it’s, it’s super well designed, super well built. It’s, I call it like the lab for teaching. It’s probably the best place that I’ve ever taught home bikers, just in terms of the diversity and how close everything is. It’s definitely, if you know, if you haven’t hit it yet, you should definitely put it on your hit list. It’s, it’s pretty cool. It is what it is. It’s just a skills Park. It’s 125 acres. But it’s, basically at mile point 17 on i 90, and then mile point 25 is Tiger Mountain. Mile point 27 is raging river. You know, it just goes on and on at the past. We have all these exits at the pass that are just amazing. So the I 90 corridor has really become a world class riding destination.

Jeff Barber 41:59
Yeah, very cool. So I was also interested to learn that you worked for years helping develop an artificial knee that allows above the knee leg amputees to pedal a bike. So how’d you get involved in that project?

Simon Lawton 42:12
Oh, yeah, that was a big project. So I was, I was a Red Bull. They called me like a local legends athlete. And so I was a Red Bull branded athlete for a while, and Red Bull rang me up one day, and they just said, like, hey, you know, we got, we got this guy. We’d love you to have you work with him. He’s, you know, above the knee amputee, but he’s an amazing mountain biker. And so he, his name is Brian Bartlett. And so he came out to take a class. And I was like, you know, first thing, I was like, All right, stand up. And, you know, like, come through this schedule, he’s like, Well, I can’t stand up. And he had, he had, like, the he had some sort of a riding leg that he was kind of starting to create. And I said, Well, what do you mean? You can’t stand up, even, like, on a prosthetic leg, you can’t stand up and balance with your level feet. And he said, nobody can stand and sprint who’s missing their knee. There’s no such thing. And being super naive at the time, I owned, I actually owned bike shops back then, I said, Well, let’s go to the bike shop and let’s bike shop and let’s, like, rifle through the parts bin. There’s got to be some parts we can use to standing. It’s like, okay, kind of a long shot, right? Since I’m not a mechanic, yeah. And so we were kind of like, looking at MRP rollers, and he had this idea already for this tendon system, and we kind of cobbled together some things that kind of started to work. He couldn’t like, I mean, he could kind of stand up, and he couldn’t really, like, wasn’t quite right yet. And so I just kind of was thinking about, like, Okay, I’ve got all these students with I’ve got all these connections, like, who, who would have a connection to somebody, you know, to some engineers or, you know, who would be interested in helping re mobilize people. And I realized that one of the guys I was working with was work was high up at warehouse or so timber, you know, lumber industry. And I thought, well, they must, they must have some some injuries, you know, lose some limbs, you know, with that. And so I called him up. And Steve was super nice and and got me set up with a meeting at warehouser. And basically, warehouser offered to give me, basically, like a team of it was eight or 10 people, mostly engineers, for a year. And I would go in with video of Brian writing, and then I would show a video of somebody, you know, with, with, I want to say, able body, but with, you know, two normal legs working. And I would show the difference and like, what we were struggling with, and they basically helped us hone in on the details. Brian already had a lot of ideas that ended up being a big part of the final design, but some of the things that were surprising, like, we wanted suspension in the leg, so we put a shock in the back of the knee, but that ended up being to return the leg. So the big problem was, like, you know, you could pedal, but then, like, you couldn’t get your leg back underneath you. And so the shock ended up being to help the rider pedal, and it was pretty cool, like we put this leg together. I think I didn’t keep any part of the business element of it. So it’s called the Bartlett tent, and it’s named after Brian Bartlett, the guy I met. I’m pretty sure he’s still selling the leg. I want to say that they’re less than $4,000 which for a prosthetic, right? Yeah, sounds reasonable, yeah. And it comes in this really trick, like, aluminum case. Last I saw, and it was pretty cool. Like, we did some, like, we showed up on the East Coast and brought a leg for somebody there, and he was missing pretty high up, you know, almost up to his hip. He was missing. He didn’t have much to attach it to, but we attached to him. And I was riding with Lars Sternberg, who’s a super, super fast downhiller guy who works for transition, and he was on my team at the time, and we got this guy’s leg put on him, and we took the ski lift up. And, I mean, Lars and I were like, hanging on for dear life to keep up with this guy. Oh my god. This guy is panning. You know, it was insane. I mean, he was jumping everything, and he was like, standing and sprinting. And we were like, wow. And so we were able to go and do, like, give those legs to a few people, and to just to watch them just get on the bike, stand up and pedal away, and, like, they never stood and sprinted, you know, since they’d lost their leg, and to watch them be able to, like, stand up and deal with bumps, obviously, you know, you don’t want to be sitting on the saddle on a technical downhill. So really, like, a magical thing. And at the time, my partner at the time, she helped set up a nonprofit that we ran. It was called athletic prosthetics, so we were able to do all of this underneath, you know that that umbrella of athletic prosthetics, and so once we got the project really kind of like dialed in, I just said, Hey, Brian, this is yours. And that’s kind of something that I’ve done with other elements, like with the Northwest cup, that was originally the fluid ride cup, and once that took off, I was like, Hey guys, you know, you guys can run this race series and have the name, but you can keep it. And so that’s kind of a big part of of that’s kind of become a theme in what I do. Kind of like with the development of lands and things like that, helping people get it to a certain level where the thing can run on its own and be like, Okay, now it’s your baby. Go ahead and take it. Yeah, yeah. Very cool.

Jeff Barber 46:45
So your latest project, snap MTB, involves a new mountain bike skills online learning environment. So a lot of universities now are offering online classes for academic subjects. But how does this look different for mountain bike instruction? So,

Simon Lawton 47:01
I mean, for me, it’s, it’s, it’s a deep dive into my into my own teaching, which is super, super cool. And funnily enough, it’s really an opportunity to have, like, really, my first TV I’ve never had. I don’t watch TV now. I have a 75 inch TV, or 75 inch monitor on the wall, yeah, which is a touch screen. So I actually got the idea from a student. He came and took a class about four or five years ago, and I’d kind of been thinking loosely about some kind of online platform, but I didn’t really have, like, a way to, kind of, like conceptualize exactly how it might look. And this guy came and took a class, and he’s at the end of the class, he contacted me. He said, I can’t remember what his PhDs are in, but there he had a couple of PhDs in instruction. And he just said, you know, man, like your teaching is really solid and it’s really good, and, like, I really was super impressed by the way you taught. But he said the thing I really learned the most from was when you showed the reviews of what people were doing right and wrong using slow motion video. But because I had, I often will use, like, an iPad or my or, like, I have a large cell phone, and I shoot a lot of slow motion video while I’m teaching and show the little things that are causing issues with riders. It’s also a tool for coaches who are new to coaching to slow down what’s happening so they can see it more clearly. And he just said, you know, like, if you had a way of, like, doing like, John Madden style recaps of riders, yeah, it would be insane, man. I could learn so much, you know. And so he was, like, really personally interested in having me set that up. And as technology has improved, and as I’ve kind of got kind of a little more bandwidth my with my business, I have a little bit of help now with people who are actually a lot more technically savvy than I am, I just decided to go for it. And I was like, you know, this is a great opportunity. I’m going to just get the 75 inch monitor. I’m going to stand up there. I made a studio in my house. So it’s, it’s basically, I’m being filmed, kind of like somebody, like a John Madden style thing, like football cap, like highlights. And to start, I’m showing a lot of my own writing. I’m showing some some students had given me rights to video, but we’re working to get rights to, you know, like a lot of mainstream video as well, and that’s going super, super well. And so basically, to start when we’re hoping to launch in the next, like, six, six to eight weeks, we’ll see how that goes. But it’s, but we’re we’ve made rapid progress. I think we’ve got, like, I don’t know, like, 30 or 40 videos done already, and the videos are, like, anywhere between five minutes and 20 minutes long. And so I can take a very short video clip and I can talk for as long as I want about it, because I’m not constricted by the normal bandwidth of like, okay, people are only interested for two minutes on YouTube. This is going to be for people who want to take the deep dive and they really want to learn the topic. So what we’re doing to start is we’re just basically taking all of our classes that we teach online, like every class. If you go to my website, you see the different classes, trail Essentials, Advanced cornering, all the air classes, and we’re breaking down the movements that we teach and the terminologies that we use in those classes. And we’re doing that on a big screen. And there will be a number of modalities that the user can the end user, like if you’re on your phone, you could just click screen only, and it’s just a recording of the screen. So you. Can hear me talking, but you’re not going to see me standing over that way. The screens actually have to see what’s going on, drawing on the screen and talking. Or if you’re on your computer or watching on your TV at home, you can actually see me standing in front of the screen teaching. And we used it. We went down and trained 37 instructors for ninja mountain bike schools recently down in chiloquin, Oregon, and we decided to show them an hour’s worth of SNAP videos in the morning. And I’d never actually seen any of the videos yet. I’d just been making them. So that was just a couple weeks ago. And so Brandon sacino, who’s who’s my tech guy, and kind of, like, responsible for a lot of the awesome things that are happening with fluid ride, he got it all set up, and we showed these videos to to this room full of instructors, and they were definitely into it. They were definitely in trance. And so we’d do like a 10 minute video, and like 10 minutes of Q and A, and I think it was actually one of the strongest teaching moments of the of of the teacher training we did with them. Was just that first kind of 90 minutes of just watching things, breaking it down, having questions asked, and just being able to go being able to go back to the video and just show exactly what I what I meant and exactly what I was talking about. I think it really landed well with people. And so I’m excited to bring this to, you know, to the broader public with something that we should be able to translate into multiple languages, and to be able to reach a lot of people with our instruction for the first time. So we’re really excited. It’s going to be kind of like a Netflix type thing, you know, kind of similarly priced, probably in the 15 to $20 range per month. And then you’ll have unlimited access to all of our instruction. We’re also putting our three feature length movies, which have been out for quite a while now, we’re putting those on the site, so that’ll be a part of it as well. Oh, cool. One of the things that’s new with fluid ride is, you know, while we have the luxury of being able to stay in Seattle, and people come to us like, I kind of got into this habit of being home, and it’s been really, really nice, but I really feel like people have been so good about coming to visit us that we’re going to come and visit them. So we’re actually doing like a US tour that we’re just in the process of setting up. I’ve just, actually just today, I’ve got my new employee starting he was Dan Bassett, who was the former Director of Education at Evergreen. I kind of pinched him away from Evergreen because cool. It’s awesome. And he’s going to help me. Basically, starting today, we’re going to be setting up our 2020 Tour, where we’re going to be, you know, in different locations from everything, potentially from Southern California to Texas to Florida to Georgia to around I mean, we’re not going to do this as our non stop go to at least not right now, but we are going to try to, like, make a pretty comprehensive US tour for next year where we visit at least one outside location per month throughout the year, so that we’re not just always in Seattle.

Jeff Barber 52:44
Yeah, awesome. That’s, yeah. It seems like a really great opportunity for people to experience the fluid ride training systems, sort of in person. And it sounds like that’s a big part of it. I mean, you need to be able to feel this stuff and not just, not just see it and understand it. You gotta, you gotta actually experience

Simon Lawton 53:01
it absolutely. I mean, that’s the that’s the best way. I mean, a lot of people will ask me questions. I just say, hey, just grab your bike. You know, once you feel it like, you’re like, oh, okay, I get this. Yeah, this is like, a total transformation of the way I’m moving over the bicycle and the way I’m thinking about moving over the bicycle. And one of the things we’re thinking of as well, because of the reception we got with the ninja mountain bike training, was, we started thinking like, Well, what about like, going and actually just doing some live instruction with a screen, you know, like, when it’s not, like, like, kind of like the Stoke before the season starts in certain places. So we thought about even doing, like, some sort of a tour where it’s kind of like a meet and greet. Maybe we have instruction on cornering and jumping, but it’s all done using a big screen talking. We’ve got an audience in front of us, and then, you know, we can have Q and A afterward. And you know, really, for me, I would say the biggest, like, the biggest gift of this whole instructional thing has been the building of community. And I say this at the end of every class, I just said, I just say, you know, like, look around where you live. Look around like, how you can come to this park here and you see all these people, you know, we’ve really built, just by sheer dumb luck, we’ve really just built this community that’s just amazing in the Northwest. And so I really, I really am eager to get out and to share that, that sense of community stoke with other people. And like, that’s really what snap is about, to me, is like, it’s shot in my living room. So I’m, like, inviting people into my home, you know. So I’m inviting the whole worldwide mountain bike community into my home to come and learn with me. And I really feel like it’s kind of a strange thing to say, but I really feel like the mountain bike community of the world is my extended family, you know. So because it’s provided my livelihood, the people are really interested in what I’m doing. A lot of riders are really interested in what I’m doing, and they’re really generous with their time with me, and so it’s something that I’m just endlessly thankful for. My inability to be qualified to do anything else in life has kept me bumbling long enough to stumble on what I’ve created somehow, and so it’s really been a magical time in my life. Yeah,

Jeff Barber 54:57
that’s awesome. Well, thank you so much. For joining us on the podcast. This has been really helpful for me, and I’m sure for our listeners as well, you’re very welcome. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Well, you can find out more about fluidride at fluidride DotCom, and also, if you’re enjoying the Singletracks podcast, we’d love to have you rate us in iTunes. So we’ve got this week, we’ll talk to you again next week. Peace. You.