By John Leitch
Posted: Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - 17:09

 

 

We were at Sandcross School and had several new riders to boot.

 

Luke Stone, aged 7, arrived with Stanley Loxston-Beed hard on his heels (same age) along with Stanley's younger brother Albert (age 4). The fourth fresh face was Nicholas Smith who is aged 12 and is a runner to a competitive standard and who now wants to build his cycling skills.

 

Welcome to you all.

 

David Burnham and myself were named on the coaching rota... the last time we were paired was when we were at Sandcross School the last time round which was back in January.

 

What puzzled me slightly, having been to the school for a lock to the gate two days earlier and finding it locked (on Sunday) sure enough, was that behind the prison-grade power fence were at least two football teams in action on the grass right next to us. How on earth did they get there?

 

As a bonus we had Derek Poole from Bikeability. 

Being such an obliging guy, we soon had Derek on 'special duties'. First up, he singled out a whizzer who was out-whizzing the rest (new face Nicholas) and so took him (and a whizzy parent) out on the free grass where they (as a team of three) could get up a decent head of steam.

 

Later on Derek was able to help with a 'one-to-one' where a rider was battling with his gear-changing. Thank you Derek.

 

The noisiest exercise (this is with the older group) by far involved welly-hoying.

 

The riders see it as fun... riding straight between two lines they pass a hand offering them a pink welly, collect it and continue, riding one-handed now, then as they pass a red box with four cones sitting on the top... the idea is to knock all four cones off and get a perfect score of 4 for their team.
As a coach, I see it as a way of teaching children to ride with one hand.

 

So away we go with two teams and all is not well. 

 

The scorer goes to sleep. 

 

After the first 100 hours (or so it seemed ) the team scores were still 0-0 and that's after the box has been brought closer you should understand. Things did eventually go uphill ( but only after first going downhill...  which is a polite way of saying that one rider fell off while attempting to complete the pink welly hand-over).

 

But what a lot of noise when people eventually did achieve a bit of ten-pin bowling skills.Good progress.

 

Another exercise (well race really) to cause confusing was the slow-fast race. 

 

All the riders line up on the false start-line and the rule is that they mustn't arrive/cross the real start-line (only 10m ahead) until 30 seconds have elapsed. Any that do so are not in the one-lap race.

 

Even when counting the 30 seconds out loud it was too much for some, they were already a wheel's distance beyond the real start-line, while others had had to dab the ground with a foot, a second cause of elimination.

 

In order to go as slowly as possible most riders picked their lowest gear for those 30 seconds, though two insisted on putting themselves at disadvantage by repeatedly picking their highest gear (curious, but hey, there you go, that's the real world).

Final 10-lap race, handicap

 

1 Joseph Armstrong
2 Emily Kirk
3 Nicholas Smith

 

We are back to Furzefield School for the next session in a fortnight's time.