BMX Basics

I'll start with an apology. I went to Woodward over a month ago... and I'm just getting around to writing about it now. There's a reason for this, besides my seemingly inexhaustible store of laziness. Too much of what you read in the BMX world is the product of short-term excitement, ain't-it-cool hysteria, and unexamined examination. Wordsworth once wrote that poetry was "emotion recollected in tranquility", and although I hate Wordsworth with a passion, I can agree with him when it comes to writing a review. The less emotional we all are, the more clearly we can see the facts.

And there's a lot of emotion surrounding Woodward. Ride magazine published what amounted to an apologetic advertisement for Woodward a few months ago, attempting to defuse all the criticism and anti-Woodward sentiment out there by attributing it to people who were jealous, clueless, or both. Since Ride absolutely depends on the goodwill of the Woodward folks, it's no surprise they were willing to cook up such an article. Heck, after fifteen years of looking at the color mags I'm not surprised by anything they do - their primary focus is selling enough magazines to make a buck, and having a positive relationship with what is probably the most important facility in freestyle BMX is an important part of that.

If you are already know what Woodward is, keep reading. If you don't, take a look at the Woodward website and then come back. As you know (or just learned), the vast majority of Woodward's programs center around the week-long sessions during the summer. Although I have thought about attending the week-long sessions in the past (only the final week of the year is open to the over-18 folks) it has been a long time since I could afford to walk away from my clients for a week. (Maybe a weekend is still too long - I took all sorts of calls from people while I was at Woodward. But I digress.) I decided instead to go for an inaccurately-named "Skateaway Weekend" in March of this year. For a few hundred bucks, you and your significant other (or riding pal) can ride all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at a variety of skateparks, both indoor and outdoor as weather permits. The price also includes lodging and a place to stay. (N.B.: Do whatever it takes to get a room at the Lodge, rather than at the Inn. Trust me on this one.) Summer Woodward weekends are structured around receiving instruction from the camp pros, but the Skateaway weekends are more of a free-for-all, ride-whatever-you-want, type of thing.

The logical first question concerning Woodward is, "Is there any reason for a racer to go there if he or she is not interested in riding vert?" and the answer is "Probably not." Woodward canceled its racing program several years ago. The Woodward track has been replaced by trails and a downhill Triple Crown-style section. The foam and resi pits are quite amusing (more on them later) but there is quite a bit of difference between jumping into a foam pit and jumping at a National-caliber track. There are a variety of racing-oriented training programs out there, and for the dedicated racer almost any of them would be more useful for skills-building than a trip to Woodward would be.

For the rest of us non-dedicated racers, Woodward can be quite a bit of fun, providing you have the right skill set prior to arriving. By "right skill set" I primarily mean the ability to ride vert. Woodward is VERY big on vert. There's only one box jump in the whole place, and it's a big one with an unforgiving backside. There are a couple of wooden doubles and step-ups, but they are not for the beginner or even the novice. Unless you are an NBL "AA Novice". But I digress. To maximize your enjoyment at Woodward, make sure you can turn around on a vert ramp. Unless, of course, you're just there for the foam.

In the months prior to my Woodward trip, I searched in vain for an accurate description of what it was like to jump foam pits and resi ramps. Now that I know, I am very pleased to be able to share that information with you. Let's start with the foam pit.

Woodward has some unusual foam pits (such as the one at the top of the huge half-pipe in Lot 8) but the main pits all follow the same pattern - a launch ramp approximately four to five feet tall, a one-foot carpeted section immediately after the lip, and a pit twenty or so feet long and approximately five feet deep, filled with foam blocks to the approximate level of the lip. In a sense, you are jumping a box jump, except you will always land on the "top" instead of on the backside.

The Woodward staff suggests that, for your first jump into the foam, you simply jump and land like you would on a normal jump. The landing will be one of the oddest things you have ever experienced, particularly if you have been riding for a long time. Your brain has been hard-coded to expect an impact when you "land", but instead you will just slow and stop in the foam. There is no exact analogy to it - it's not like jumping into a pool because water has a surface tension that foam blocks don't have. Maybe the best way to think of it is to imagine that you are bungee-jumping with your bike. At some point, the bungee will stretch and you will come to a slow stop. And just like a bungee, the foam follows the rules of action and reaction. When you have come to a complete stop, the foam will kind of "toss you out" and you will pop back up to some degree. If you have a lot of forward motion, you will end up flipping over your bars, which sounds terrifying but isn't. If you do not, you will just bob back up to the surface.

After two or three foam jumps, the feeling of near-invincibility sets in and you begin to think that you can try anything. Do not trust this feeling. It's possible to be seriously injured in the pit, and most of the time it's your own bike that does the injuring. I saw a few riders try extended no-footers only to land squarely on the seat. Ouch. Another guy tried a backflip and was clobbered in the head by his handlebars. After a near-perfect 360, I slipped a foot on the landing and centerpunched a Snafu pedal into my left shin, coring a variety of skin samples into the setscrews that serve as "pegs" on the old Snafus.

You can see some foam-pit photos here. I also have a three-minute movie which I'll put up at some point. I probably "rode the pit" for a total of six hours or so over the course of the weekend. It's a lot of fun. You can approach your "foam time" one of two ways. You can either work on tricks you are close to pulling but could use some painless practice to perfect, or you can try something you would never try over a standard box jump. I chose the second route, working on big-air 360s that would end my miserable career pronto were I to try them on a big box jump. If you choose the former, and decide to learn something that you expect to pull on wood or dirt when you go home, the foam pit is only half of the learning process. Once you've achieved some confidence in the foam pit, it will be time to move on to the resi ramp.

I don't know exactly why it's called a resi ramp. Maybe it's the resin-type plastics that cover it. Who knows? A resi ramp by any other name would still be a fascinating device. The launch ramp is the same as for a foam pit - in fact, at both Lot 8 and Cloud 9 the resi and foam areas are side-by-side and each use half of the launch ramp - but the rest of it is quite different. Instead of a pit, you have what looks like a plastic-covered box jump, complete with a real backside. At the end of a the backside is a huge wall pad to stop you once you land. It takes a real bit of mental effort to accept the idea that you will not be hurt when you ride full-speed into the "wall" at the end. There is a rubber mat which runs down the center of the plastic top and backside - if you land on the mat, you will have traction. If you don't, your wheels will slide out from under you. This is a safety feature, as we will see in a moment.

Under the plastic of the ramp is a foot or so of foam. The plastic is very soft, so when you walk onto to the resi ramp you will feel your feet 'sink' a bit. When you jump and land on it, the feeling is halfway between the no-landing feel of a foam pit and the unyielding "bonk" of a wooden ramp. The difference between this and a wooden jump is that, if you land wrong, there is something to absorb the impact a bit.

Notice that I said "a bit". If you know for a fact that you cannot land a 360, you should go back to the foam pit and work on that 360 before you try it on the resi, because landing on the resi really can hurt you. Here's an example. One of the people I rode with at Woodward wanted to learn backflips. He "stalled out" his first few flips in mid-air and landed on his head - something that is dangerous, but possible, to do in the foam pit. Eventually, he got the backflip motion correct. He went over to the resi to try it - and stalled-out in midair, landing on his head. It might have killed him to make that mistake on wood. On the resi, it resulted in a concussion and a trip to the hospital - still not something one generally enjoys. So be careful.

As noted before, only the center of the top and backsides of the resi have a no-slip pad. The rest is very slick. The purpose of that slickness is to let you "slide" when you land wrong. Sliding is much less painful than 'sticking'.

A well-disciplined rider can learn a lot of difficult tricks by using the foam pit and resi ramp correctly - and that's gotten a lot of people angry. Some of the old-school dirt-jumpas and ramp riders believe that creating a safer environment in which to learn 360s, backflips, truck drivers, and whatnot has destroyed the dignity of the sport. Back in the day, of course, deciding to learn backflips meant you might break your neck. Landing a "truck driver" wrong could lead to a very long hospital stay. Even "basic" tricks like no-handers and can-cans are pretty scary to learn on dirt or wood. Some people firmly believe that riding foam pits is just not in the original spirit of BMX. Others will go further and state that the whole idea of Woodward - a squeaky-clean, adult-run, Disney-affiliated "extreme camp" filled to the brim every summer with skateboarders, rollerbladers, and kids on "T.J. Lavin" signature models - is disgraceful and unworthy of "real riders".

Are their objections legitimate? It depends on what you think the "original spirit if BMX" was. I think the "original spirit of BMX" was based around the emulation of motocross - a competitive activity - and the minute you wander away from the idea of being first across the finish line, you've already lost the "original BMX spirit". Grinding a stair rail, riding a vert ramp, jumping huge doubles all by yourself - none of this stuff has a lot to do with the way BMX originally was.

On the other hand, if you see the "original spirit of BMX" as just having fun on a bike and pushing your limits a bit, then we can include all of the above, and foam pits, and whatever else people can come up with in the future, as part of that spirit.

There's a lot of discussion in our community about what "real BMX" is - and a lot of emotion. Old Wordsworth wouldn't approve of me getting too emotional while I'm writing this, so I will simply say: I don't know if Woodward is "real BMX", but I will tell you this - it's real(ly) fun.