MBL Pilot Course - Feeling the Pressure!

I've been delivering the Cycling Ireland/Coaching Ireland MBLA Trail Cycle Leader course for a few years now with great success in training the guides and coaches of the future.  It's the industry standard introductory level leadership course qualifying guides to lead groups of up to 8 people on terrain below 600m and within 30 minutes of getting help.  As good as the TCL is, there has been a growing demand for an advanced level qualification without the limitations on remoteness and terrain from both existing guides and from myself too.  As such, Cycling Ireland tasked me with writing the new qualification and getting it to match all the Coaching Ireland 'Advanced' qualification criteria.  Not an easy task!

Luckily, the framework for the course already existed and I was able to use the excellent Scottish Cycling Mountain Bike Leader syllabus as a guide.  Taking that course and improving and advancing it to the levels demanded by Coaching Ireland took many weeks of design, session planning, meetings, conference calls and practice until finally a couple of weeks ago I was ready to deliver an observed pilot.

I must admit that it was a lot more daunting than I'd anticipated actually delivering the course.  I'm well used to teaching and coaching with all types of people but with 4 candidates on one side of me and a panel of 4 observers made up of my tutoring peers and representatives from Coaching Ireland and Cycling Ireland on the other, I did feel a bit sandwiched in the middle.  I'll openly admit to being a bit of a perfectionist and so although it was a pilot course I put myself under great pressure to deliver a polished finished article.

Did it work?

Largely yes it did!  The timings need a tweak and there are a couple of suggestions from Coaching Ireland on content and also around firm pre-requisites in terms of the personal skills of participants but essentially it was a great success.  Therefore, I'm anticipating that Rock and Ride will be offering the new Cycling Ireland MBL course from early 2014.

The course is a step up and away from the Scottish Cycling MBL course with a greater emphasis on personal ability and coaching without losing any of the essential leadership aspects.  It definitely focuses on developing leaders who are not only safe to operate in remote mountainous areas but are also able to offer the detailed one to one coaching skills that really add value to a clients experiences.  For Cycling and Coaching Ireland, leadership and coaching have to be viewed as one interlinked entity and I totally agree.  The idea of a leader who doesn't coach seems ridiculous and unrealistic to me, if you can't teach somebody how to ride a bike properly then how can you safely lead them on a mountain biking session?

A good MBL standard fix on the pilot MBL training!

 Who is the new MBL course for?

- Existing TCL holders who have used that award extensively and to its limits.
- Coaches and guides that want to legally and safely operate in highly technical terrain.
- Guides that want to operate abroad in the mountains (it will be internationally recognised so can be used to guide in mountainous regions throughout Europe, except France!).
- Highly skilled guides who want to be recognised as being amongst an elite group at the pinnacle of their profession.

The assessment is going to be deliberately very tough, physically and technically in order to ensure that only the very best can gain the qualification.  Criteria for the assessment are obviously discussed in depth during the training course.  Pre-requisites for training include the ability to ride highly technical terrain confidently and confidence inspiringly and perform skills such as bunny hops, riding drop-offs and step ups and pumping.  If you can't do these things then you are recommended to attend an Intermediate Skills course a few months prior to the MBL course.

Cost will be around £165 for training and £90 for assessment.  Contact ian@rockandrideoutdoors.com for more details.

Broken Dreams - A Cautionary Tale Of Woe

Not really broken dreams, just broken bike bits but I thought a dramatic title might suck you in and it has!!  Anyway, the Rock and Ride crew have been hit by the rear mech gods last week with both Paul and myself doing expensive damage resulting in unplanned walking and swearing combos.  Mine wasn't the usual blap it on a rock type of incident though so I thought I'd briefly share it with you to avoid a repeat and save you some annoyance.

I was literally two minutes into a ride when for the first time in over 25 years of MTB I snapped a gear cable.  Faced with the prospect of spending the entire ride in top gear (not appealing, I've tried singlespeed on a 32-16 and that was bad enough!) I had to fit a new cable.  Smugly buoyed by the fact that I always carry a spare cable having spent years telling MBLA candidates the advantages of doing so I was quickly back on a fully functioning bike.  As I don't carry cable cutters I did the obvious thing and coiled the spare foot of left over cable into a neat little circle and got on with enjoying my day.

It was the final run of the day when my bike suddenly (and I mean very suddenly) locked up and stopped.  A glance down at the mangled wreck of metal near my back wheel confirmed the worst, my wallet was going to take a battering!  I carefully removed the twisted gear hanger, took off the snapped mech and tried to get out the chain that was wedged behind my cassette.  Simultaneously I was trying to work out what the hell happened as I hadn't hit anything.  Long story short, the spare cable had unwound and wrapped itself around the back wheel behind the cassette, instantly destroying the hanger and pulling the mech into the gears, snapping it in half.  The chain got thrown into the back wheel and got so badly wedged that I decided a 45 minute walk back to a chain whip and cassette tool was better than killing the back wheel by ripping it out.

Check out the twist on that hanger!!

Unfortunately upon taking the cassette off I found most of the drive side spokes were trashed anyway so I still had to rebuild the wheel, so the final tally was about 12 spokes and build time, a new hanger, new mech and obviously another new gear cable too.

So what's the moral of the story?  Be better prepared and carry a set of cable cutters?  Be less prepared and never carry a spare gear cable?  Actually neither.  As I carried my bike a few miles back to the van I was overcome by a strange calmness.  It dawned on me that I was walking through a beautiful forest in fine warm rain enjoying an inner peace to match the tranquility of my surroundings.  I felt energised and healthy and thought of friends who haven't been so lucky on bikes recently, damaging bodies instead of kit.  My ride had been brilliant, fast and loose.  For the first time in about 2 years I felt pretty pinned but the breakage allowed me a different kind of experience and I was all the better for it.  Like Ferris Bueller said. 'life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it'!