Beginning Dirtbiking for the Sentient Mountain Biker
So, there you are. You've been riding mountain bikes for a few years, and maybe you snowboard, or ski, or skate, or do some other action sports, but for some reason, your parents (like mine) were evil satan-worshipers, and didn't teach you to ride a dirt bike when you were young. The most rational response starts with killing your parents, but we'll forgive and forget, and try to move on positively.
You know how much fun the twisty downhills are on your mtn bike? On a dirt bike, the uphills are like that. And the flats. And the downhills are still like that. WooHoo! And while a riding a bicycle offroad is very challenging and rewarding, dirtbiking is something you can continue getting better at for many, many years. It is by far the most difficult sport to get really good at that I have ever undertaken (among mtn biking, snowboarding, xc and downhill skiing, skateboarding, roller hockey, volleyball, soccer, and a few others), and the most rewarding. You think racing a bicycle is hard? Wait until you try an enduro, in my opinion the essence of dirtbiking. After your first enduro, talk to me about how easy it is to just sit there and twist the throttle.
Alot of my mtn biking buddies are concerned about the cost and trouble of keeping a dirtbike running. I have found that I spend LESS time and money on my dirtbike than I did on my mountain bike. Bearings and suspension are sealed better, parts are beefier, and unless you are the type to gratuitously break stuff, a dirtbike will resist most of the behaviour that would bring a pedal-bike to its knees. And just like your pedal-bike, you can do almost all the work yourself.
Many new dirtbikers I meet don't have the advantages that extensive mountain biking brings. Years of riding a bicycle teach you about balance, reading the terrain, equipment maintenance, and brake modulation. Equally important, riding gives you the kind of fitness that most others can only imagine. On the other hand, you'll be starting from scratch in regards to the throttle, which has a MUCH bigger effect on your bikehandling that you would imagine. You might also be as clueless as I was with respect to weight distribution and braking in corners (hint: front brake while turning can mean traction). You'll also have to learn to look at trails in a whole new way, because once you're riding a 200+ lb vehicle, you can't just wuss out and carry your bike over the hard parts.
If you have reasonable coordination, and you study hard, in 6 months to a year, you can develop the skills to take advantage of modern high-performance bike. Until then, do yourself a favor; buy, borrow or steal something small and light and used and easy to live with. If you are tall and strong, your choices are almost limitless. 4-strokes like the honda xr250, or kawi klx300 are solid trailbikes than grow with your skills for quite a while. A 2-stroke like kawi's kdx200 will make a bit less low-end torque, a bit more top-end power, be easier to start, cheaper, and lighter than a comparable 4-stroke and will also require you to learn about mixing oil with your gas.
If you're smaller, or lighter, you may want to consider something like yamaha's ttr125l (a great choice for riders less than 5'8" and/or less than 130 lbs). Honda's crf150 is another good choice for smaller folk. It may sound like a little bike, but after riding with "crash and burnadette" on her ttr125l, I can assure you it won't slow you down much. The confidence you gain from a lighter, easier to ride bike will allow your skills to develop exponentially faster, and in a few months, you'll be ready to take advantage of the power and suspension of something bigger (and more expensive), and you'll be dogging up folks who've been riding longer but went straight to the big-bore machine.
If you're interested in real dirtbiking on the kind of trails you like to mountain bike on, stay away from the big, heavy, street-legal rigs, like the Honda xr650l, or the Kawi klr650. Even the Suzuki DRZ400s is way too heavy for a beginner on any kind of technical trail, although it'll be fun on dirt roads and easy stuff. If you absolutely must have something street-legal, and you are ok with the fact that you'll probably break your turn signals and stuff, consider looking at smaller dual-sport bikes like the Kawi klr250, or the yamaha xt225.
Dave Wood has been one of the top off-road racers in norcal for decades. He also teaches off-road riding and racing skills to all levels of riders. According to Dave, the biggest problem new adult riders have is starting with a bike that is too big and powerful. Just because you weigh 200 lbs, and you played football in highschool, doesn't mean you have any business learning on a ktm 525 (I can vouch for this. In one of the classes I took with Dave, I helped rescue a fit, strong, young man who was just destroyed from muscling a big bike around all day in technical terrain). Not only is a big bike harder to keep upright, and harder to pick up when it falls, but until you have a few hundred miles of riding under your belt, the extra power makes it HARDER to ride. Then you crash and get hurt, or discouraged, and you end up giving up dirtbiking and taking up ocean-kayaking, or some other wuss sport.
Whatever you start with, unless you're preternaturally stupid and lunkheaded, you'll be ready to move up in less than a year, so buy a recent used bike (or scrounge one from a buddy) and save your hard-earned greenbacks for your second bike. For more info and suggestions on a bike to get started with, check out dirtrider.net, thumpertalk.com, ktmtalk.com, or just email me.
I am not by nature a high-risk being. I prefer to start slow, work hard, and increase my speed as my skills catch up. This worked for me for 10 years of expert-class mtn bike racing, and it seems to work just as well for dirtbiking. I can't help it. I just hate crashing and getting compound fractures. Call me a wuss if you must, but when you're 50, we'll see how all that scar-tissue feels. Not everyone is like me, but I counsel you nonetheless, ride within your limits. At first, you will go awfully slow, and you will notice that in alot of places you could go significantly faster on your bicycle. Don't worry. That'll pass.
If you're like me, your mountain-biking experience will probably cause you to want to head straight for the singletrack as soon as you figure out how to work all the controls. Singletrack is definitely where the fun is for me, but it's also where some of the challenge and danger is. Think of all the times you've wussed out and carried your bike over a gnarly rocky section. That ain't happenin' with a motorbike.
Now, no one in his right mind would go dirtbiking alone, but that didn't stop me. When I started riding, all my buddies were subaru-driving, granola-eathing, tree-hugging, liberal, hippie vegetarians who were not enlightened as to the pleasures of smelly, noisy, fun, motorized transport. I started out riding the easy trails at Cow Mountain and Middle Creek in Norcal, and by going alone, I could go at my own pace, with no pressure to keep up, and no one to laugh at me when I flailed and looked stupid. You have to be pretty conservative when you're by yourself and a beginner. On numerous occasions, I parked the bike and walked down an intimidating hill to see what the whole thing looked like, and be sure I would be able to ride back up if I had to. There were a couple trails at Cow Mountain that I rode on my bicycle first, so I could judge whether or not I had any business riding them on a motorcycle. If you can possibly find a patient friend who doesn't mind riding slow with you, and can be trusted to not take you on anything hellishly beyond your abilities, so much the better, but i was doing all-day rides right from the start, and my dirtbiking friends would have been bored senseless riding with me those first months.
In order to save you some pain and suffering, and take advantage of what you already know about pedal biking, here are some important things to keep in mind as you transition to motorized riding, and some similarities and differences between the two disciplines of 2-wheeling:
Grasp the closed throttle with a straight wrist: As you roll the throttle open, your wrist will bend down. That is where it should be. It is tempting to roll your wrist up, then wrap your hand around the throttle, so when you open the throttle your wrist straightens out. This is a very dangerous newbie mistake, especially on a 2-stroke. When you hit a bump or otherwise get bounced backwards, you will suddenly open the throttle wide, and bad things can happen in a hurry, especially when your weight is already back and you're gripping the bars too tightly to release the throttle.
Keep your weight centered on the footpegs: especially on more technical stuff. Motorcycles like to be ridden from the pegs. It makes the suspension work the way it's supposed to, and it keeps you from getting knocked for a loop by the seat, which can happen if you hit an unexpected bump while your weight is on your butt. Compared to mtn biking, you want much less weight on your hands too, which is something you may have to think about on steep downhills. The more you are on the pegs, the happier you will be.
Bend your elbows: Alot. Your elbows should be bent somewhere between 90 degrees and 135 degrees. That feels funny to a mountain biker who is used to keeping her arms extended so her elbows have only a slight bend in them, but it puts you in the "attack position", centered and ready to react to anything.
Learn to use both brakes: If you're a decent mtn biker, the front brake will be easy, even though it's on the other side of the bars, but especially on a 4-stroke, it's easy to ignore the rear brake and rely on engine braking to help control your speed. This works fine until you try to turn, and you're on the front brake, and the engine momentum is still pushing the bike forward, so you overbrake with the front and wash out the front wheel and fall on the ground. Sometimes you have to do this over and over and over before someone points out that you need to pull in the clutch and use the rear brake too. This might be the single biggest obstacle to going faster in control for a new rider. At least it was for me.
For God's Sake keep the BALLS of your feet on the pegs for trail riding: If you're jumping at the motocross track, you'll want to be more on your arches on the pegs, but for trailriding, there are many rocks, stumps, and gnashy-toothed trolls just waiting to reach up and grab your toes if you let them drop below the level of the pegs. If you're lucky, it'll just knock your foot off the peg and scare you. If you're less lucky, your toes will catch, and your foot will wrap around the footpeg with great force and much breaking of bone and screaming in pain. Keep your toes up and the balls of your feet on the pegs.
Do boring drills: Spend 10-15 minutes every time you ride doing basic drills, and your life on the trail will be happier. My favorites:
Look where you want to go: You may know about it from bicycling or some other sport, but your body tends to subconsciously go where you are looking. If you stare at that big rock in the middle of the trail, you will almost certainly hit it. Look where you want to go and you will go there.
Lean the bike further than you lean when cornering: Most bicyclists tend to stay pretty in line with bicycle when cornering. On a motorcycle, this only works until the wheels slide the least bit. Then the bike is a little out from under you, so your weight is not on it, so traction is worse, so it slides more, and before you know it, you're sitting on the ground. In corners, lean the bike over further, and get your crotch off to one side of the seat, like right about at the corner of the seat, if your seat has corners. Then when the bike slides a little, it slides more under you, instead of out from under you, so you have time to react if you need to.
Each ride, pick ONE skill to concentrate on: And then keep thinking about it and applying it the whole ride. One ride you can work on keeping your elbows bent. The next ride maybe keeping the balls of your feet on the pegs. The next time, maybe focus intently on looking where you want to go. This way, these skills will worm their way into subconscious habits, so you can concentrate on having fun. Even after you no longer suck at riding, every now and then pick a skill and concentrate on it for a whole ride. Even the best and fastest racers have to do this to stay on top.
There are enough redneck dickhead assholes already riding dirt bikes, so if you're going to be one of them, just quit now and spend your money on a monster truck instead. Dirtbiking definitely has a worse PR problem than mountain biking, so go out of your way to be nice to people when you ride. Depending on where you live, there may be alot of shared trails. As a mountain biker, you have a pretty good idea of how you'd like dirtbikers to behave when you come across each other on the trail, so be like that. Slow down or stop, avoid stirring up tons of dust, especially when you come up behind a rider and pass. If you see horses on the trail, pull over, kill the engine, and take off your helmet so the horse knows you're just a person on a machine, and not some new form of carnivorous, horse-eating predator. Keep the noise and dust down near houses or campgrounds. I sometimes push my bike out of the campground before starting it, just because I know I don't want to listen to anyone else's noisy toys, and I'm sure they don't want to listen to mine.
Try to go out of your way to mention dirtbiking around your tree-hugging, knee-jerk, liberal kook friends at Starbucks, or when you drive your Subaru to Trader Joes, or anywhere else you can obviously come across as a dirtbiker who isn't an ignorant, redneck, trailer-trash jerk. We have alot of stereotypes to overcome.
Don't forget to keep riding your mountain bike. You may find some of your dirtbiking skills transfer over. You'll certainly appreciate the fitness you get from pedaling, and you'll also love flying up the twisty climbs that are such a pain-in-the-butt when you're pedaling.
If you hate this page, don't email mark@motosapiens.net, just read something else.