Whistler MTB: Day 1-2

 

We had painstakingly picked out a recommended instructor but events intervened and Whistler assigned us Tommy Steele instead. Rather than meeting us at Creekside they wanted us in whistler village, so we had to ride 15 minutes to the village with our downhill bikes, which are not ideal for riding flat or uphill. 

Tommy put us through a barrage of lessons (we rode Beeline, Easy Does It, Del Bocca Vista, Tod, Rod, and various trails while he kept telling us not to sit down) and even went out of his way to drop us into Creekside village at the end of our lesson. I got his number in case we wanted more lessons later. 

On our first day of riding together we did Weasel Juice to Little Addler to Blueberry Bathtub. Tommy had told us we needed to be able to do Monkey Hands easily before going up to Top of the World, so we did Naughty Hands and then tried Monkey Hands which was way too hard. We did a few more technical loops before going up the Garbanzo express to ride Unamoss, Midguard, Southpark, and Earth Circus back. I discovered that the Garmin Edge 840 has a jump detection momde when mountain biking. It would detect when you jumped, record how long your jump was for and how long you stayed up in the air ("hang time"). It would also chirp at ou as positie reinforcement. On my first day I got 2.68s of air time. 

Back at the AirBnB Bowen started watching Youtube videos to design our progression.