Last month I stated that Pros have realistic ideas of their abilities on the bike, and that you should, too. The obvious difficulty is that most of us have no idea how to do so. Sure, we could count our trophies, but those trophies don't really tell us much. A third-place trophy could be the result of a strong charge from the back of the pack, or it could mean that everybody wrecked but you, and then two of those guys got up and passed you again.
Yes, I will admit to having been re-passed by a rider who wrecked-but that particular gentleman has been crowned World Champion more than once. And, he wrecked me going by!
There are three ways I know of to honestly evaluate your abilities, at least in part. The first method is to hire an intelligent and educated pro like Billy Harrison or Todd Corbitt to watch you ride and to offer his suggestions. (Today, I'd suggest Jeff Dein, Bill Madden, or Geoffrey Ssengoba.--jb) I'm not talking about going to a clinic, although that would certainly help; one-on-one training is the subjecct here. The costs of housing and feeding that pro during the several days he would need to really look you over would probably drive you into bankruptcy, even before you have to pay the pro his fee for checking you out. So, we'll shelve that option for now.
The second method is the one we're going to discuss this month. It is known as the elapsed-time method. Professional riders of all sorts often use it as a benchmark to measure the development of their physical skills. You will need the following equipment: an empty track, a buddy, a stopwatch, a pen, and some paper. Got it? Let's move out.
The first thing you will do is mark a spot on the starting hill where you will start from each and every time. Elapsed-timing is best done when the gate is down, because starting is a separate skill and must not be measured in conjuction in what we are about to do.
Begin with one foot on the ground and the other on your "strong" pedal. Your buddy will call, "Ready! Set! Go!" You will begin pedaling around the track. When you cross the finish line, or another line you have chosen for this purpose, your pal will stop the watch.
Do this ten times in a row, with plenty of rest between your runs. Throw out your best two times and your worst two, and average the remaining six. That's your elapsed-time measurement. If your timing buddy is also a racer, help him out and time his runs in the "downtime" between yours.
The elapsed-time statistic is a measurement of the following things, in no particular order: Your physical strength and pedaling ability, your jumping finesse, your endurance, and your ability to correctly assess a track and pick out the fastest lines through each turn. Should you improve in any of the areas listed above, your time will go down. Lose your skills or become demotivated, and your time will blow up like B-12, to quote Tupac.
The elapsed-time statistic does NOT measure the following qualities, which are also important and will be discussed next month: Your ability to predict and anticipate the actions of other riders, your stability during contact in turns, your ability to quickly choose one of the three lines through a corner, (for clarification on the three lines, read the September 1995 issue.) and your personal courage, both physical and moral. All of these qualities must be measured against your competition.
Let's put this in more familiar terms. Elapsed-time tests the strength of a hammer, so to speak, but it does not point out how well the hammer's owner can swing it. That doesn't mean that elapsed-time testing will not provide us with some seriously useful info, because it will. Over the course of testing yourself, you are going to learn a couple of interesting things about BMX. I'll leave some of these tidbits for you to discover, but here's a couple for the lazy among us:
#1. You can make up speed (and time) a lot faster in a corner than down a straight. In order to go faster on the straight, you've got to get stronger or improve your pedaling technique. Consider the following---to shave one-half of a second off your time down a hundred-foot straight, you've got to go twenty percent faster. So if you are a John Purse hauling down the straight at 25 miles per hour (36 feet per second), you now have to do 30 mph. The Purser may be up to training himself into a twenty percent raw speed improvement, but the rest of us probably aren't.
Picking up half a second in a corner can be as easy as choosing the right line and sticking to it. Oh, while you're choosing that line, be sure to find the low pass, high pass, and block pass. Something tells me that you're going to need them some time.
#2 Try jumping AND rolling every rideable jump on the track before you make up your mind what to do in the race. Don't make the mistake of picking the obvious way over every jump. What you don't know can cost you time. Case in point: A tabletop on the second straight on my old home track was both easy and seemingly profitable to roll, so nobody ever jumped it. Sure, we jumped it in practice, but during the race we all pulled and tucked. Imagine my surprise when I accidentally came up to the jump with my balance off, had to jump the table... and landed ahead of the first-place rider! The reverse is also true. Some doubles, even steep ones, can be ridden faster than they can be jumped, especially in traffic. Christophe Leveque proves this all the time. I might add that unless you are way ahead, or way behind, you're in traffic, so don't forget to consider your squirrely comp when you come up to these jumps.
#3. Don't always pedal so darned hard. Down the first two straights, try putting some pedaling in your personal endurance savings account. Relax and save some effort. Instead of 160 RPM in the second straight, try 140. Then, at the end of the track, use that extra energy to power through a rhythm section or long final straight. You'll more than make up the ground you lost before. It doesn't work on every track, but why not try it on your local track to see for sure?
The most important part of the elapsed-time measurement is that it is also a training method. When you make a change in the way you ride a corner or hit a jump, the results will be immediately obvious in your time. You can put these "secrets" to work in your motos, leaving the competition guessing.
Five years ago, I used elapsed-time measurement to discover a new line through a "cereal bowl" corner at my home track. One I found it, I was never passed again in that corner, and I mean never, not even by riders whose ability dwarfed mine. They were riding harder, and I was riding smarter, or something like that, so I won. Or at least I wasn't passed until the following straight, which is worth something in itself.
Riding the track all the way through, ten times in a row, will also probably open your eyes to the need to improve your anaerobic and aerobic endurance. The good news is that if you ride enough, that endurance will improve, and that will give you the extra edge at the end of a long moto.
I know you're used to riding the first straight and then slacking off. Believe me, I do it too. It's fun. It's easy. And when it's time to race, we'll race exactly the way we've been practicing.
(Readers offended by BMX nostalgia should skip immediately to the next paragraph.) The truly great BMX pros of yesteryear were endurance masters. You couldn't count Stu Thomsen down until the guy ahead of him had crossed the line, and even then you had better have checked to make sure that Stu didn't pass that dude in the end. Too many great riders today spin five hundred great feet and then sleep or wheeze the rest of the way. Not Stompin' Stu.
Over the course of a race season, committed riders can see their elapsed-time measuremens on a particular track improve by five seconds, ten seconds, or even more. By simply riding the track as much as possible, measuring your progree so you know what to work on , and directing your efforts toward your weak spots, you will not fail to improve, whether you are a pro or a 5 Rookie.
"But, Jim," you may be saying, "you haven't told us HOW to improve!" Some of the technique will become apparent to you as you start to ride in a scientific manner. I'll take care of the rest as the months roll by. Next month, we'll step beyond the elapsed-time measurement and discuss the most exacting method of measuring BMX rider performance known to man. Needless to say, I made it up.
See you next month. Until then, from the catalog of Famous Excuses Stolen From Other Hobbies and Sports: "My racing technique guarantees a win at the end of twelve hundred feet. Unfortunately, my home track is only nine hundred feet long."