Been thinking about and trying to work out some rough guidelines on the best dimensions and ratios to use when building a kicker for a couple of months now.
The question pops up on SurfingDirt Forum occasionally and it needs to be in the ATBA-UK Track and Jump building guidelines anyway.
So, after a late night session yesterday, and some summing up today here’s what WSG7, Brindy and me have come up with:
Kicker designs usually start with, ‘I’m going to build it this high…’, so that’s where we started. Everything would have to be based around the height of the kicker.
The radius is the next thing, and usually the hardest bit to get your head around. We would need five simple ratios to give us Really Mellow, Mellow, Medium, Steep and Really Steep kickers.
It would be handy to know how long the kicker is going to be so you plan how much wood or mud you’ll need to build it.
Kicker Ratios
Working from deciding what height you want your kicker to be, the radius for a Really Steep kicker is 1:1.6, a Steep kicker is 1:1.8, a Medium kicker is 1:2, a Mellow kicker is 1:2.3, and a Really Mellow kicker is 1:2.6
Length
We can work out how long the kicker is going to be with this simple formula: height / TAN (angle in degrees) = length.
Doing the calculations that figure out where a rider will land, how high they will go, and how much time they will spend in the air, on each kicker and different speeds.
Checking the model against the measurements I took of real mountainboarders going over a real jump ant Ironsides.
Do some thinking about landings and where they should be for each tracjectory to reduce the Effective fall Height.
Get it all written up in a way that makes sense so it can go in the ATBA-UK Jump building Guidelines
Does having a mountainboard centre in an area increase the population of mountainboarders? Which county has the most mountainboarders? Which areas have the fewest mountainboarders? What has the greatest effect on the number of mountainboarders in an area; hills or population?
To answer these questions we took a sample population of 200 mountainboarders selected at random from the ATBA-UK database. We marked each of them on a map, along with all the Mountainboard Centres, and we did some statistical analysis of the data.
Here’s what we found:
22.5% of riders live within 10 miles of a Mountainboard Centre, and just over 30% of riders live in counties with a Mountainboard Centre. Herefordshire is the most densely populated county with 8% of riders. West Sussex and Devon were joint next most densely populated with 6% each. Cornwall had 5.5% and Gloucestershire had 5% of the mountainboarders. With an average for a county being just under 3%, it’s clear that having a Mountainboard Centre in an area certainly does get more people into mountainboarding and keep them riding.
The least populated areas were Wales, Scotland, and the East Midlands and Eastern regions. Also, there were surprising gaps in the Somerset/Wiltshire area and in Kent, but this may have been due to the selection process. Wales had 4.5% of the mountainboarders selected, approximately the same as Cheshire. Even though Wales has three times the population of Cheshire, plenty of terrain, and a mountainboard centre, it still has a lack of mountainboarders. Scotland is even worse off than Wales. Even with plenty of terrain and a population of five million people, only 3.5% of our mountainboarders live there. The low number of mountainboarders (just 2.5%) in the area from Scunthorpe down to Northampton and across to Ipswich could be easily accounted for by the lack of suitable terrain, but we don’t have any information to back this up.
So, what does all this tell us? It tells us we all need to support Mountainboard Centres if we want a strong community of riders. It tells us we need to think about ways we can encourage people to get into mountainboarding in areas without centres. And it tells us that we need to think about the big picture of supporting the growth of mountainboarding in the UK.
It’s a curious paradox that Mountainboarding, as such a physical outdoor activity, is completely reliant on the virtual world of the internet for its entire existence. Would mountainboarding be where it is today if it wasn’t for the internet, and will making greater use of what the internet offers secure the future of mountainboarding?
A brief mountainboarder-y history of the internet
In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee while working for CERN created and implemented a hypertext system and, in 1991, CERN released the World Wide Web to the public. In 1993 the first web browser, Mosaic, was released and the potential of the internet was quickly realised by companies racing to be the first to offer new services like online ordering (Pizza Hut) and internet banking (First Virtual). Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication through email, forums, and websites.
At the same time as the internet was becoming part of every business, community and persons life, MBS, noSno and Outback were developing their first mountainboards (You can read more about the history of mountainboarding on Remolition). With mountainboarding and the internet developing at similar times, it stands to reason that a close relationship would develop with mountainboarding becoming reliant on the internet to promote its existence, sell boards, create communities, and organise competitions.
Everyone needs a website
With the help of the Wayback machine we can have a look at some of the mountainboarding websites from those early days. In 2000 the ATBA in the US had a website as a means of communicating with other riders,mostly about competitions.
On the other side of the Atlantic, ATBSports.co.uk used their 2001 website to pull together mountainboarders from all over the UK to tell them about the British Championship competitions.
The MBS website has been through quite a few incarnations since the early 2000’s but has always been focused on sales along with encouraging people to get the latest mountainboarding news.
noSno has had the same website since 2002, which, in a way, reflects the mountainboards they make which also haven’t changed a great deal since those early days.
How have mountainboarders been using the internet?
Other than every company having a website to promote themselves and sell boards, other mountainboarders began using the internet to communicate with each other, arrange meet-ups and competitions, and share photos of themselves enjoying their sport. ATBSports forum was, for a long time, a key website for mountainboarders around the globe (although mostly in the UK) enabling lonely mountainboarders to realise they weren’t alone and that an entire community was out there waiting for them.
And then along came Facebook. There were other factors that contributed to the demise of ATBSports forum and other mountainboarding forums, but the rising popularity of social networks, especially Facebook, meant that people (who just happen to be mountainboarders) had another way to talk to each other. In Europe the average person belongs to 1.9 social networks, and in America it’s an average of 2.1, meaning that as people join a new site they generally leave an existing one. It wasn’t until around the middle of 2009 when Facebook hit 250 million users and everyone realised that everyone else on Facebook was just posting inane rubbish from their everyday lives that mountainboarders went looking for somewhere to talk to each other about mountainboarding.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Central America at around about the same time SurfingDirt forum was being hatched in the mind of prolific website builder McCarver. It was his fifth website and made, he said, “to be a more adult friendly site without too much censorship where a bunch of swearing, bitter old farts who love to ride could chat about how much they love mountainboarding”. Three years later and it is undoubtedly the place to be if you’re one of those bitter old farts, but also has a broad demographic of mountainboarders of all ages, disciplines, and opinions. What makes SurfingDirt work is the tone McCarver sets for the forum. When we join a group we are socially and culturally conditioned to look to a patriarch for established norms and acceptable behaviours. McCarver fulfils this role in a subtle and non-authoritarian, but always watchful, manner, but as he says, “I just have to remind myself to tone it down from time to time.”
Using the Internet to promote mountainboarding
Whilst the internet provides a fantastic means of communication for mountainboarders, it also offers numerous ways of promoting mountainboarding to those who don’t do it. Websites with articles, event reports, how to guides, photos, and videos show anyone who actively searches for mountainboarding on the internet a bit of what is going on within the sport of mountainboarding.
Websites like Remolition.com, mountainboard.net, and mountainboarding.uk.com offer a wide range of mountainboarding related content that can appeal to mountainboarders and those looking to find out more about mountainboarding. There is always the issue of communities appearing closed and insular to those on the outside, but at the very least these sites show the depth and diversity of mountainboarding as a sport, recreational activity, and community.
‘Extreme Mountain Boarding’, from 2006, has had more than 330,000 views on youtube, which means that either the same thousand mountainboarders have nothing better to do than watch the same video over and over again or that lots of people have watched a mountainboarding video that shows it as a serious competitive sporting activity that requires considerable skill.
Andy Milenkovic’s association with Bing just goes to show how close a relationship mountainboarding has with the internet, and how sometimes things can work the other way round with an internet-based company using mountainboarding to promote itself. So, does this tell us that the internet is the best tool for the job of promoting and increasing awareness of mountainboarding? What about mountainboarding offline? What about using other medium such as print and TV to promote it?
Does mountainboarding need to be on TV?
Mountainboarding has been on TV a bit. We’ve had a few commercials featuring mountainboarding from Ford, and Nissan, we had Johnny Kapahala, and we had Matt Brind on the BBC. In contrast, on the internet, youtube has enabled the sharing of countless videos of peoples mountainboarding exploits from all around the world.
The differences between mountainboarding on TV and on the internet comes down to Reach, Frequency, and Relevancy. TV ads arguably have a great Reach as more people see them, but that reach is often limited to a particular geographic area. TV ads suffer from very limited Frequency due to the huge costs involved in buying airtime on television networks, and often struggle to achieve Relevance as the percentage of people watching TV who actually want to get into a new action sport is going to be very low.
Videos on the internet are different. Their Reach is potentially far greater as wherever you are in the world you can watch videos from everywhere else in the world. Frequency is also greater online as the video is always there, waiting for you to press play. But Relevance is where online videos really come into their own. It’s only those that want to watch mountainboarding videos who search for them. This makes the videos very relevant to the viewer. But what effect do the videos really have? Just seeing something on a TV ad or in a youtube video doesn’t necessarily make you want to do it.
And what about being in newspapers and magazines?
Mountainboarding has had it’s fair share of mountainboarding-specific magazines for such a small sport, including Off-Road Boarding Magazine, ATBMag, Scuz and Mountainboard Magazine. It has, however, always struggled to gain any real sustained coverage from local and national newspapers.
Off-Road Boarding Magazine founded in 1999 in the U.S. by its editor Brian Bishop and other dedicated riders. All Terrain Boarding Magazine aka ATBMag was the longest running, 4 years, and only mountainboard magazine to make it onto mainstream newsagent shelves. Scuz Mountainboarding Zine was first published in July 2004 as a paid-for magazine, but subsequent issues were distributed for free. And Mountainboard Magazine was a was re-branded Scuz designed to suit changing trends in mountainboarding but only one issue was ever printed. All of these magazines started well but ultimately all suffered the same fate.
Winning the World Downhill Championship gets your photo in your local newspaper, and if you were a journalist working for the Guardian or the Telegraph between 2002 and 2007 you might have been lucky enough to get sent out for a lesson in how to mountainboard, but that’s about as far as mainstream coverage goes for mountainboarding. This of course is completely understandable as very little about mountainboarding is actually newsworthy, and as editors often have their own agenda which doesn’t always portray mountainboarding in a positive light, may not be a bad thing.
Lots of time, effort and money was put into producing printed media about mountainboarding during it’s first fifteen years, but just as the internet has drastically changed the way mainstream newspapers and magazines work, it also affected the viability of mountainboarding magazines. This may be seen as a negative effect the internet has had on mountainboarding, but the benefits of mountainboarding being so intimately intertwined with the internet greatly outweigh the downsides.
Would mountainboarding be where it is today without the internet?
I, for one, wouldn’t be mountainboarding today if it wasn’t for the internet. I bought my first board online. I went out to the nearest hills looking for somewhere to ride and bumped into the local mountainboarding club. Until then I didn’t know there was such a thing as the sport of mountainboarding, competitions, or a community of riders. Not long after that I started running a mountainboard centre and became more involved in the wider mountainboarding community.
My example illustrates that although mountainboarding undoubtedly needs the internet to promote itself, there needs to be a direct correlation with the offline activities. An online campaign to tell people to go mountainboarding isn’t going to achieve much if it doesn’t tell people where and how to do it. Mountainboard Centres need a strong online presence, including a website, youtube channel, facebook page, etc., but all those efforts need to be focused on getting people to go to the Centre for a lesson. Without that follow through all that online promotion is wasteful as it doesn’t convert into income for the centre or new riders for the sport.
Without the internet as a promotional, communications and sales tool, I have no doubt that mountainboarding would not only not be where it is today, but would not exist globally as a sport, recreational activity, and community. At best there might be a few people occasionally taking out their old frame boards for a carve on a nice day when they have nothing else to do.
So, what does the future hold for mountainboarding?
We ain’t seen nothing yet. However we conceive of the internet now, and whatever we can conceive of as its future, it will surprise us all. The relationship between the internet and mountainboarding will only get stronger and more interconnected.
For mountainboarding websites, the increase in smart phone use will mean they have to ensure they are optimised to work well on small screens and make greater use of geo-location to do more than just be an online brochure, but offer real unique value to the visitors. Without this evolution, websites will rapidly lose visitors as they will be too busy to return to a site that is not updated regularly with new content, which will have the knock-on effect of the site not showing up in search results as so losing even more visitors.
For mountainboarders, the future of the internet will most probably involve being more connected and more mobile. As 4G is rolled out across the UK in the coming years, greatly improving mobile internet connection, we will be in a position to develop more useful and interactive apps that will still work when you’re out riding in the woods. Using GPS to find new routes and track every ride whilst streaming live video straight to youtube from the head-up display on the glasses that connect wirelessly to your mobile phone will become the norm.
But the real question is whether mountainboarding can leverage the connectedness that the internet offers to achieve our aims of growing the sport. This won’t happen by accident. There needs to be a plan, a strategy of constant development, and, of course, a strong relationship with mountainboarding in the real world.
Autumn is most definitely here, and that means its time to get out in the woods and feel the leafy goodness beneath our wheels. Here are ten things to remember to take with you:
Your mountainboard – And yes, I’ve known people turn up to a freeride meet having forgotten their board.
Helmet and pads – Always a good idea with trees, rocks, roots, team bad, etc.
Spare wheel – Getting a puncture is no fun if you’re deep in the woods and the car park is a mile away.
Tools – A spanner to change the punctured wheel and Allen keys to adjust your trucks.
Water – Dehydrated brains don’t work as well as hydrated ones, and if you’re feeling thirsty its already too late.
Snacks – Something light and easy, just in case you get peckish or need a bit of an energy boost.
Camera – Whether you go for a headcam, a pocket snaps camera, or something more serious, its nice record what you get up to and share it with those less fortunate.
Mobile Phone – GPS New runs, tweet that sweet slide, call other mountainboarders for a jumpstart if you’ve left your lights on; these new-fangled smart phones are very handy to have. Just don’t smash it.
Headtorch – So the setting sun doesn’t have to ruin your fun.
A philosophical approach to life. Sometimes you have a good day, sometimes you don’t. Freeriding is all about going with the flow, and not just when you’re riding.
Scottish freeridey goodness on the 17-18th September? In typical Jock fashion this promises to be badly thought out, unplanned and with probably rubbish weather. 2 mile forest runs, singletrack steepness and puddles are guaranteed though.
Can’t say no to that. Better get the week off work and plan some riding. Think I’ll head north on Tuesday, spend Wednesday and Thursday in the Lake District to check out a track for a Downhill Comp next year and get myself one of those ridgelines I’ve been eye-ing up for a while. I’ll head up to Scotland on Friday, maybe check out Drumlanrig on the way, meet up with Marvin, ride the BX track in Perth Friday night. Then over to Dunkeld to camp for a Saturday and Sunday of riding the 2005 ATBA-UK DH track and scouting potential courses for a Scottish DH comp next year.
I spent the past few days working on updating the ATBA-UK Instructor Training Programme. It’s brought a lot of my more unorthodox thoughts on teaching mountainboarding to the forefront of my brain.
Powerslides Vs. Emergency Stops
Traditionally, most mountainboard lessons have included learning to powerslide. Some instructors even teach it before turns. I have a few problems with powerslides for beginners. Firstly, doing powerslides well requires a certain amount of board control, which most beginners don’t have, and so often go wrong, or at least take some of the fun out of the lesson.
Secondly, if they are taught as a way to avoid hitting something or someone, then what a powerslide actually does is take away the riders ability to steer and keep them heading towards the thing they are trying to avoid in an uncontrollable manner.
My third issue with powerslides is the safety/legal aspect. If a person suffered spinal injuries from a powerslide that went wrong, I can just imagine the lawyer questioning the instructor with something like, ‘So, you gave the client helmet, wristguards, elbow pads, and knee pads, and then told them to put the part of their body that isn’t protected on the ground at speed?’ The instructor might as well hand over their wallet there and then.
So, what’s the alternative? I think J-turns should be the main stopping technique taught to beginners. Taught properly, J-turns can be used to stop safely at any speed, and the rider remains upright and away from the ground.
And if the rider needs to learn an Emergency Stop (not a powerslide, which I think is actually an intermediate technique), then they should be taught to get low and pull a hard backside turn so they steer away from the obstacle.
Heel straps
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a beginners board used for teaching at a centre with heel straps. Why not? Most regular riders use heel straps because we recognise how much more control we have over the board, and yet centres/board manufacturers/instructors/whoever still seem to to like to make it as difficult as possible for beginners to control their board.
I realise there is an extra expense associated with heel straps on a fleet of beginners boards, but part of that cost would be offset by not having to buy leashes, and the heel straps don’t have to be proper ratchet heel straps. A few metres of seatbelt material would make an entire fleet of heel straps.
Giving a beginner a better, and more realistic, experience of mountainboarding would surely help to get them coming back. It’s also got to be safer as it prevents them from taking a foot off the board whilst they’re going along and twisting an ankle or doing the splits.
Using brakes
Just about anyone I mention this to says, ‘Oh no, bad idea.’, but I’m not put off the idea. I think teaching people to mountainboard with brakes has two big advantages. Number 1 is image. If more mountainboards had brakes, and people didn’t have to look quizzically at them and ask ‘How do you stop?’, the boards would look safer. They’d fit into people’s preconceived ideas about things with wheels having brakes (i.e. bikes). If people saw that they could have a go at mountainboarding without the risk that comes from slides and putting various parts of your body on the ground at high speed, then more of them might give it a try.
Number 2 is a equality. Tackling the safe/dangerous image would get more people to have a go. But with slides as the main stopping technique, the rider needs to be of a certain physique, fitness, and flexibility. With brakes more different types of people can not only have a go, but stick at it. I’ve seen loads of people hobble away from mountainboard lessons with a bruised behind, never to return. Take away the need for slides and a person can ride all day without ever getting muddy (I’m reminded of the scene in Riding Giants where they are talking about the revelation of tow-in surfing and how they could ride all day without getting their hair wet) or getting any bruises.
The argument against brakes is that reduces the skills a rider learns, but I’m not so sure about this. They may learn different skills, but riding well with a brakes takes skills too. And what’s better; fewer highly skilled riders or more less skilled riders?
I realise these are unorthodox and even unpopular ideas, but sometimes steps forward come from the out-of-the-box thinking, and without considering new ways we’ll be stuck doing things the same old way forever, even if it’s not the best way.
I’ve seen quite a few mountainboard competitions over the years, seen things riders do that gives them a competitive edge and seen the mistakes they’ve made. Maybe a bit of thinking about how to approach riding in a comp, and what to focus on to improve your riding might help.
BoarderX
Get out the gate first and fast. Watch the other good riders and learn from how they pull out. Being in front of other riders not only gives you the obvious racing advanatge but it has a psychological advantage too.
Get good at pumping. BoarderX races are won or lost over rollers so learn how to pump as smoothly and efficiently as you can.
Get round berms fast. Berms usually slow riders down, especially when there are other riders also trying to get round it. The outside line is usually the smoothest and fastest, but sometimes the shorter but slower inside line can get you in front. Learn to judge which line is going to be the fastest and look for gaps in between the other riders.
Practice every line. Most riders just ride their preferred line when they’re on their own. Practice coming out of each gate in turn and follow that line down the track, just as if you had other riders in your way.
Ride close. Practice the track by riding really close to your mates, not trying to beat each other, just trying to stay as close as possible the whole way down the track so you get used to having other riders right next to you.
Freestyle
Go big. Big and stylish beats small and technical, so get good at jumping and then add the tricks.
You won’t impress the judges by keep trying the same trick again and again. If you don’t get it, move on to another trick.
If you know the jumps get yourself a set of tricks that work well on that set up. What works well over two big jumps won’t work on a slopestyle with four smaller jumps and a quarter, so tailor your set to the jumps.
Variety is good. Don’t just learn to 360 one way, learn all four, and then learn them with grabs. And if you don’t have that many tricks change the order that you do them.
Find your trick. There are loads of tricks that never get used in competition. Pick one of those and get good at it. It’ll make the judges notice you.
Downhill
Walk the track. Look at from a riding perspective and plan you lines.
Get a safe run first. And then go a little bit faster to get your time down a bit. Doing that is better than trying to go as fast as possible every run as you don’t give yourself the chance to learn the track.
Tuck. Learning to speed tuck properly (or at least as properly as you can on a mountainboard) will make a huge difference to your time.
Sliding out kills your time. Avoid it at all costs. So if there’s a part of the track that gets you every time slow down before you get there rather than keep trying to get through it at the same speed.
Learn to tic-tac. If you do slide out you need to get back on your wheels and up to speed as quickly as possible. With no rollers to pump like a BX course, tic-tacing is the best way to gain speed from a standing start.
Competition riding is all about smoothness, which comes from time spent on a board. Practice makes perfect. Unless you practice the wrong thing, in which case you become perfectly wrong. Practice the right thing.
