mountainboarding | Roger Swannell

Why are competitive riders grouped the way there are?

Roger on 26/05/2013

Competitors in mountainboard comps are almost always grouped by age, and some times by gender. But why? Just because you’re the same gender and a similar age as another ride, why should you be competing against them? Neither age nor gender have any causal relationship with mountainboarding ability. So why are all the women put in one group and all the men over thirty in another group?

If we think back to the beginning of mountainboard competitions, when there weren’t very many riders, and the range of ability was much closer (I assume), it might have made sense to split the women from the men, and the younger riders from the older riders. And although the splits between the groups have moved over time, the historic idea of how riders should be divided has persisted.

At Round 2 of the UK Series 13 we rolled out a new boarderx qualification system that took a step away from the old way of classifying riders and grouped them by ability. We started with a list of riders, used their previous results to sort the list best to worse, and then split the list into groups of twelve. Each group then had three races so riders could earn points before being sorted back into their categories. The riders seemed to like it.

It’s always nice when the riders like the changes we make, but that isn’t why we did it. We came up with this system to make the qualifying races more interesting for those riders that otherwise would have had three pretty much identical qualifying races. We wanted the system to be safe first and foremost, which is why we don’t include the Groms (under 12’s), and we wanted it to help riders improve their racing ability, which makes them safer and reduces injuries.

It’s a step towards moving away from the arbitrary classification of riders. I wonder where we’ll go next.

A way of laying out a berm

Roger on 25/05/2013

I’ve been struggling to figure out how you work out the right radius for a berm for ages now. But today, I think I’ve figured out the basics of laying out a berm using the measurement of the corner across the apex.

Layout the tracks, coming into and out of where you want the corner. Make sure that your guide lines cross so you know the area you’ll be working in.
Measure a straight line across the inner apex of the corner and all the way out to the start of the corner and the finish of the corner. We’ll call this ‘a’.
Join up the two points where the incoming and outgoing track cross to give us a guide line that intersects the inner and outer apex’s. Then divide ‘a’ by two. We’ll call this ‘b’. Take the length of ‘b’ from the start of the corner to where is meets the apex line.
Where ‘b’ meets the apex guideline is the centre point around which we’ll layout the berm and ‘b’ is the radius for it.

It needs some real world testing but the immediate advantages of laying out a berm using this method are that the curve of the berm is constant rather than changing through the corner and forcing the rider to adjust their course, and that it is fairly simple to do with just a length of rope and a stake.

Building The Perfect Track

Roger on 02/05/2013

I want to build a mathematically perfect mountainboard track. It would include all the knowledge we’ve gained from thinking about how tracks should be built.

It would use a clinometer to ensure the track always runs at a constant angle, the rollers would be built using a sine wave with a 7:1 ratio, and the berms would be laid out using constant curves and radii.

All I need is a hill and the time.

Stars and pyramids

Roger on 01/05/2013

A few things happened today which made me think more about the strategic level models that guide how the ATBA-UK works on its mission of supporting the growth of mountain boarding in the UK.

I currently have two models at different stages of completion and understanding.

The Riders Model

Mountainboarding rider's progession model

This pyramid shows the pathways approach we use to understand what types of mountainboarders there are, how people get into mountain boarding, what barriers get in the way, and what we do to help people overcome the barriers.

First timers are mostly those people who go to a centre and have a lesson. For most of them, that’s all the mountain boarding they will ever do and we recognise that one of the barriers that exists for this segment is the perception that mountainboarding is a one off activity like paintballing or zorbing but isn’t the kind of thing you do as a hobby.

Those that do take up mountainboarding as a hobby we call Hobbyists. These riders usually have a cheap board, will ride occasionally during the summer, and aren’t part of the community. A lot of these people are perfectly happy riding occasionally, but the barriers that prevent this group from moving up the model include the price of boards, not having others to ride with, and perhaps having lots of other things going on in their lives.

Those riders that are part of the community and ride regularly we call Recreational Riders. Moving a percentage of these riders up to the next level is a priority to counter the attrition rate of Competitive riders, who are those that participate in competitions. Arranging different types of competitions and choosing different locations for the competitions is one of the pathways we use to take Recreational Riders into the Competitive level, whilst also hopefully providing some variety for the Competitive Riders to keep them interested.

The Industry Model

Mountainboarding industry constellation model

This Constellation Model is actually a model used by social enterprises to enable partner organisations to work together to achieve the same goal without having to be formally organised as a single entity. It means that any organisation within the constellation can get on with doing their thing regardless of the other organisations, but they are all working together in a loose way as they all have the same goal.

As I adapt this to fit the world of mountainboarding, I can see constellations developing for ‘Mountainboard Centres’, ‘Activity Centres’, and ‘Retailers’, with the ATBA-UK taking on the role of stewardship and the shared vision being one of growing mountainboarding in the UK. What is particularly interesting on this model, and why I think it fits mountainboarding so well, is the chaos/order line. This shows that all the elements of the various constellations can and do operate in a disorganised way, but that the shared goal and stewardship can bring order to the whole system and achieve more than the sum of it’s parts.

The final stage of this model development will be figuring out how the two models fit together and mutually support each other, e.g. with the Centres constellations having a focus on First-timers and all levels of riders in the Pyramid having a connection with the Retailers constellation.

Getting MUKy

Roger on 18/04/2013

I’ve been trying to be more disciplined and spend one evening a week on each project. Thursdays is for mountainboardng.uk.com. Having looked at the analytics I took the Your Questions Answered out of the menu and the sidebar as it obviously isn’t getting any interaction from visitors. I also added a couple of new products and collated some info for an article. Just got to write it now. I’ve also got a list of design changes to make to the site but at least now I know that I can expect to work my way through them every Thursday evening.

The MUK ifttt seems to be working pretty well. Even though each post only gets a few views (because not many people like the page and because facebook doesn’t really like automated posting), it’s a regular feed of mountainboarding stuff happening online in the UK. The ebay listings yielded a positive result of getting an old mountainboarder to buy a board and get back into it.

The Stelzer Solution

Roger on 14/04/2013

Spent all day building the spreadsheet to run the BoarderX racing.

We start with a list of riders who have entered the comp, order them based on their results from last year, split them in groups of sixteen so riders of the same ability are competing against each other, give them three races each to earn points, add those points up to get their qualified position, sort the riders into their categories maintaining the order they qualified in, fold them into their first knockout race, remove the two who finish 3rd and 4th, repeat unto the final, and then add up all the finishing places to get a list that looks very much like the one we started with.

How to layout berms

Roger on 09/04/2013

Today’s work on berms.

Finding the centre of existing berms using two dissected chords.

What is the best radius for a berm? Somewhere between two and three times the width of the track.

Laying out the out-track to make use of the tangent line the rider will be following as they leave the berm.

Euler Curve for the cross-section of the berm, giving a 5m wide track a riding width of approx 5.6m in the berm.

Just need to get it all into some kind of easy to follow instructions.

How we should build berms

Roger on 07/04/2013

I’ve been thinking more about writing track building guidelines, and although they need to be quite detailed, I think they also need to have simple takeaway ideas that are easier for people to get their head around and make it more likely that the guidelines will get adopted.

These could be things like:

Tracks – Build up, don’t dig down.
Berms – Constant radius, and build on the track, not next to it.
Rollers – Seven times as long as high

What we learned from our first Downhill comp in the woods

Roger on 07/04/2013

The ATBA-UK’s first woodland downhill comp took place on the 6th April. Here’s so of the things we learned, and will use when planning future comps.

Downhill comps that don’t use the riding track as the uplift track run far more smoothly as the riding keeps flowing. Previous comps that used fire tracks for riding down and driving up could only do one at a time, which interrupted the flow of the comp and wasted time.
Our uplift held four people at a time, which as it turned out was fine.
The riding started at 11:30, half an hour later than planned but not a problem, and went on til about 15:30. The riders stopped before we ran out of time, which is better than the other way round.
The riders took breaks when they wanted, which worked out better than having a scheduled lunch break.
We need more dedicated officials. This one took the concept of ‘Rider-run comps’ to a new level, with injured and tired riders taking over the timing. It’s great that we have a) such a strong community of riders and b) such a simple system that this can happen, but it does mean that things will be missed and mistakes happen during the change-overs.
The synchronised watch timing system is still the best solution, not only for it’s simplicity and that it doesn’t need communication between top and bottom, but mostly because it proved plenty accurate enough at this comp.
Finding/making a track that is challenging to the Pro’s and yet accessible to new-comers continues to be something we need to think about. The solution to me, especially in places like Head Down, is to have two tracks, an easy and a hard, both starting and finishing at the same places.

Parallel Processing in Preparing for Competitions

Roger on 05/04/2013

Usually, the comps come together through a small amount of coordination between a few of the people involved, and lots and lots of thinking on our feet and improvising. This isn’t a very efficient way of doing something like organising a comp, and often means things get missed that really shouldn’t be.

So, I’ve been writing up the workflow processes for running ATBA-UK comps, with the short term aim of streamlining the process, and the long term aim of making hand-over to new committee members/event organisers more effective.

It’s actually more complicated than you might think. It’s hard enough to just mindmap everything into one place, there is always more to add and stuff you’ve forgotten. But having got enough stuff on the list, it’s then time to start organising the list. The obvious way of doing this is ‘first thing first’, ‘second thing second’. But this is a very linear or serial approach, and raises problems. The first problem is that the second thing can’t be done until the first thing is done, so if something stops the first thing, everything grinds to a halt. The second problem is that it’s much harder to coordinate a group of people to all accomplish things on the list together.

You could divide the list into smaller lists, one for promotion, one for paperwork, etc., and give each person their own sub-list. But then what we see is that each list contains a wide variety of tasks and that the person assigned that list may not have skills to accomplish everything on their list. So that won’t work.

What we need is a way of parallel processing the tasks on the list so that everyone involved can take on tasks that they are able to complete, do them at an appropriate schedule, and not get in the way of other tasks or people. Hmmm, needs more thinking about…