Simon Lawton from Fluidride Talks About the Most Fundamental MTB Skill
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2019
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Simon Lawton is the founder of Fluidride, a world-class mountain bike instructional school located in Seattle, WA. He’s helped riders all over the world in person and through his online videos. He’s also a tireless mountain bike trail building advocate and his nonprofit has helped disabled riders get back in the saddle.
I ask Simon about his overall approach to mountain bike skills instruction and he shares tips for cornering and manuals. We also talk about trail advocacy, favorite places to ride around the world, and how video is changing mountain bike skills instruction.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:29.8 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. |
| 0:33.8 | My name is Jeff and today my special guest is Simon Lawton. |
| 0:38.1 | Simon is the founder of Fluid Ride, a world-class mountain bike instructional school located in Seattle, Washington. |
| 0:44.9 | He's helped riders all over the world in person and through his online videos. |
| 0:49.4 | He's also a tireless mountain bike trail building advocate, and his nonprofit has helped disabled riders get back |
| 0:56.3 | in the saddle. Thanks for joining us, Simon. Nice to be here. So you were a professional downhill |
| 1:03.0 | mountain bike racer for 16 years and turned in many impressive finishes in that time. How did you |
| 1:09.6 | personally become such a skilled rider? |
| 1:13.3 | I wouldn't say that I was that great of a downhiller. But regionally, I was pretty good. |
| 1:19.4 | I used to kind of like choke when I got to World Cups and things like that. I'm just kind of like |
| 1:22.7 | a bit of a mental block. But I have had some good results over the years, and I definitely had a lot of fun. |
| 1:29.4 | The way in which I became such a skilled rider is really the same way in which I became a coach. |
| 1:35.0 | It was just due to my own frustrations of my inability to ride like a pro. |
| 1:39.5 | And kind of when things really switched from like Mammoth Mountain Comacazi, like racing down fire roads, which I was quite good at right off the bat. When it switched to technical single track, that was really when I had to take a step back and just kind of say, like, wow, this sport has really changed. And, you know, is this something that I think I can do? And really what I did was I stood on the sideline and I watched riders and I saw what they were doing and I started to mimic those movements and then |
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