Sunday 20th March 2011
Report and photos by Tui Allen
We met at the Waipa Mill Road carpark. Perfect cool sunny weather. There were nine WAMOs and Brad O'Malley our skills instructor. The nine WAMOs were Brendan Haigh, (club president) Blair Prescott, Chris Moody,
Tim Cullen, Annetta Tegel, Klaas Tegel, Ralph Kumm, Shane Easton and myself (Tui). Before heading into the bush, Brendan reminded us that the club expected us to pass what we learn on to other members at every future opportunity. That way our good skills can spread virally throughout the club until WAMOs are the best in the land.
We headed into the bush and found the sunny clearing near the pump track.
Brad started by sorting our bike setups. Much lowering of bars and repositioning of seats and shoe cleats. Then he carefully taught us the few basic rules of bike position for safe efficient riding. We practiced each rule until we could combine them all into one perfect bike position as demonstrated by some of us in the photos below.
Braking techniques came next and then cornering, with emphasis on the 'question mark' technique. We spent plenty of time practising our new-found skills on magical trails that Brad revealed to us, including one combination of trails that descended endlessly from a point so high that he had to throw us all onto a shuttle bus to get us up there.
In the forest we spotted many of those huge fat red toadstools with white spots - you know the kind that sometimes have elves sitting on them? Perhaps Klaas is an elf since I clearly remember seeing him trying to sit on one. He was perusing it at close range from beside a freshly felled punga tree down a steep bank by the trail. Strangely, he seemed to have crawled underneath his bike to get a better view of the toadstool. It took him a while to get himself upright afterwards. And I'm sure the punga tree had human teeth marks in it.
Blair accidentally performed for the camera all day; he crashed, he rode perfectly, he saw ghosts, etc. Consequently he has more than his fair share of space in our picture gallery below. But he had fun in the process.
After spending the day with my camera bouncing around behind me annoyingly, I learnt one thing more than all the others there, that is if you intend to carry such a bulky camera (and I do!) you need a dedicated backpack for mixing cameras with MTB. Brad even had good advice on that.
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