Saturday 21 February 2009

Off-Camber Challenge on the Skills Loop

With the off-camber sections of last year's Drumlanrig Dirt Crit race in mind and the first 2009 Dirt Crit coming up on March the 14th, we chose to devote this Saturday's session to the subject of riding off-camber on the skills loop. Off-camber is about riding across the face of a slope and the main difficulty is maintaining grip. Luckily ground conditions were excellent, but this made the once-tricky off-camber sections of the skills loop a breeze to ride. As a result, we moved quickly to the steeper slopes adjacent to the skills loop in order to provide the riders with a real off-camber challenge. Ewan Clark provided some fantastic demos to help riders develop their skill and we all had fun debating the various merits of different lines. The picture above shows Guy trying out the low line.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

Club AGM Highlights

Thanks to everyone who attended our club AGM that was held last Thursday in the Auldgirth Inn. There were 15 people at the meeting, which was chaired by Richard Lord from Scottish Cycling. Some highlights of the meeting are
  • Club constitution, finances, development plan ratified for a further year. Please contact a committee member if you would like to see a copy of any of this documentation.
  • The committee members were re-elected. These are Peter Charlesworth (Chair), Michelle Clark (Treasurer), Quentin Palmer (Go-Ride documentation), Rik Allsop (Head Coach), Andrew Taylor (Coach), Richard Riley (Drumlanrig Rep), Ewan Clark (Youth Rep), Richard Lord (Scottish Cycling Rep), Ginny Allsop and Jane Taylor
  • Guy Willoughby has kindly offered to fill the club welfare officer post. Thanks Guy. This role forms an important part of the requirements laid down by British Cycling for clubs applying for Go-Ride Clubmark status.
  • Trail Cycle Leader training is due to take place for a number of club members at the end of February. This will mean that we can extend our club activities to include more guided rides in the woods.
  • The organisation of the senior wing of the club was discussed and we are planning to set up a web forum to help people to organise rides.

Coaching Session - 10:00 - 12:00 Saturday 21st February

The theme for this Saturday will be riding off-camber and Ewan Clark will be with us to provide his expert input and demonstration of technique. The aim of the session will be to help riders to build the skill to ride the off-camber that we found in our January session at "Dusty's Diversion", but we are planning to start out on the skills loop.

As an experiment, I am planning to run this Saturday's session for an extra 30 minutes to finish at 12:00. Feel free to get in touch if this is going to be a problem for you. Anyone who has not renewed their membership should complete a membership form and bring it along to the session. This is required in order to act as a record of rider information and parental consent. Please e-mail me if you need a copy of the form. On a similar vein, session fees will continue to be £2.50 on a per session basis; there are one or two overdue from last year that I should really collect to be fair.

Watch out for news of upcoming club activities including coaching sessions involving the new Scottish Cycling Coach, Richard Lord and the Drumlanrig Dirt Crit under 16's MTB races on the 14th March. See the activities plan links to the right of this blog for up to date details of the club activities.

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Club AGM at the Auldgirth Inn 19:00 12th February

We are holding our club AGM at 7pm on the 12th February in the Auldgirth Inn. Anyone who has an interest in the club is warmly invited to attend this meeting. We are hoping that this will be a family night where everyone has their chance to find our what has been going on in the club and to have their say on what happens in the next twelve months. It would be great to see as many of you there as possible and we hope that you will be able to make it along. Accompanied children are welcome.

If you'd like to raise something at the meeting, but aren't able to make it, please feel free contact Rik, any other committee member, or reply to this note.

Coaching / Inter-club Event 09:50 - 12:30 Saturday 7th February

As promised here are the full details, hot off the press from Keith Stocker and the Stepping Stanes, of this Saturdays joint event between our club and the Stepping Stanes:

This Saturday's session is at Heathall Forest and is going to be a fun inter-club race session for riders from both SteppingStanes and Drumlanrig. Please note: this is not a open race event, and as such will be conducted as a coaching/activity session. The plan will be to have several short events including some team relay races, and some different age group short course racing. Plus some other daft games and challenges. (Once I've thought of them!)

The session starts at 10am, so please meet at the Pines Golf Centre at 09:50am ready for bike checks, etc. The session will end at 12:30. The Pines Golf centre can be reached from the A75 Dumfries by-pass by turning off towards Lockerbie at the Lockerbie Road roadabout; the entrance to the Golf Centre is immediately on the left after about 20 yards.

As with any race session that we run we will need a number of people to help with marshalling and making sure the session can run effectively and safely. As such if you are available to come along and help/take part in the session it would be great to have you there to help out.