So who am I and how can I help you ride off-road better than you do now.

Well I’m not a famous dirt bike racer, or even a well known one. I am the
author of this website and as you’d see from the Road riding content, I have some
credentials on the road and track, and hopefully you’d agree can transfer that knowledge
to you.

So what’s the cred in the dirt?  Well I did start my riding career in the dirt, motorcross, but only in my early teens then I got heavily into the road and track riding.

But what I can bring is that same need to understand what I am doing and why I should be doing it differently that has always driven me to coach and break down the activity of riding into chunks you can use to raise your own level of riding.

In my 40’s , late 40’s I decided I wanted to get back into dirt riding.  After many decades away from the mud I jumped back into it.

The reason was simple. I had got very fast on the track and to really have fun I was travelling very quickly.  There is an old saying, the amount of fun you’re having is in direct proportion to the amount of throttle you’re twisting.   On the track this meant very high speeds and small margins of error and to be honest I was getting old and, well , not bouncing like I used to.  So dirt it was.

It turned out to be a great choice, I was able to use maximum throttle on a moment by moment basis and when it went wrong, the landing was, mostly, soft, mud or embarrassing.  No hospitalisation required, or very expensive bike rebuilds.

More importantly, the challenge, the thing that most of us need, something to push against, to beat, became not speed but obstacles, hills, rutted climbs, greasy impossibly rock passages crossed with fallen logs.

And again, I was breaking down what I was doing, why I was failing and what I needed to do to succeed.  I desperately wanted to crack the skill gap and get fast and smooth where obstacles like a vertical climb were no longer an invitation to exhaustion and a mud bath at the bottom, but a step to the real obstacles, the ones I was yet to even get to and was currently too exhausted to even look at.

So my credentials, well they are my ability to look into what works and what doesn’t and articulate that for you in a way you can consume reliably and learn.  It comes from the years that followed as I learnt the “Art” of the dirt bike, as I rode more enduro and got faster, as I learnt that despite all the rough terrain, smooth was still fast and the skills you need are even less obvious.

That its still a dance with the bike.