During the winter I had contacted Brad at Montgomery Co. Parks and Rec to set up a possible skills clinic for Blue Ridge Gravity. When I got to talking to him, he wanted to go ahead and set up two of them; one in the spring and one in the fall. I had a hard time getting people together for instructor positions, but we deffinitely talked about it and had a few people who were really interested in pushing this. The spring clinic ended up not happening due to noone signing up. When that happened I didn't have that high of hopes for the one in the fall. Well the summer flew by so fast it wasn't funny, many good times were had. Fall snuck up on us and so did the clinic. I get a call from Fred this week saying, uhhh Brad called me and said we had registered riders for the clinic. I was pretty worried how we would pull it together, having not really prepared much at all for this. We were pulling from our own experience and using Lee McCormack's "Mastering Mountain Skills" book as a reference.
www.leelikesbikes.com We decided to keep it simple and work on the basics; we worked on the attack position and cornering. We had a group of kids and adults and I've never done any teaching or instructing. I don't have any kids of my own, so I had no clue how this would go. I could sense that Fred was a little nervous before we started. I let him warm up and get the bugs out, after that we bounced off one another throughout the clinic with input from our other instructors Josh and Gabe also. I feel like that dynamic worked out really good, much better then just hearing it from one person, it also seemed to help get people more involved or engaged.
I had no idea going into this how rewarding it could be. I can now see why people teach, get the little pay they do and continue to do it day after day. There are some unseen rewards from being able to help people get where they want to go. The kids were truley rewarding because they show the most expression. Seeing a kid after you've taught them something and "they get it" is truley awesome. It was within minutes that the kids started to catch on to what we were showing them and we quickly saw them getting around faster and faster with more confidence. Seeing how much fun they were having while using what we taught them and it working for them was very rewarding. In my opinion the best thing about working in a bike shop is getting to sell a kid his/her first real bike. They have that look in their eye and it's almost as if they know the freedom that is about to come to them through those two wheels. I would say that teaching the kids about riding is every bit, if not more rewarding. There were photos taken, I will try and get my hands on them once again. I did snap one picture here it is...
The fall colors in Blacksburg are ahead of the colors in Roanoke. It was pretty awesome in the woods today.
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