Another week of sun greeted our dedicated young riders, who came out even though it was Thanksgiving weekend. With our smaller numbers, it allowed us to do a ton of riding this week, and work on many new race skills.
We started the day with an obstacle course that practiced our bike handling skills that we worked on last week. Then we set off on our warm up laps around Trout Lake, followed by a quick stretch. After our stretch we ran through a quick overview of proper braking technique, which the riders all had little difficulty mastering. This was followed by a few fun races across the length of the field. The challenge for these races however, was that I chose to gear the riders would be using. Our first race was done in gear 1 (easiest gear), making the riders pedal like crazy to get across the field. This was followed by a race in our hardest gear, making for a hard effort to get started. This led into a discussion about appropriate gear use, and proper shifting technique.
We followed our lesson on gears with an introduction to group riding. For this we broke up into pairs and practiced riding close to the rider in front of us. After mastering this, we joined our pairs into a larger group and had our first experience with a pace line. With an introduction to the single pace line completed, we briefly tried out a two up pace line (seen in the picture below).
After all of the skills and riding throughout our session, we managed to find the time to end our day with a loop around Trout Lake. I think there were definitely some tired legs by the end of today!
