Watts It All About, Shane?

Watts It All About, Shane?

Remedial roosting at the Dirtwise Academy of Off-road Riding with Shane Watts

JOHN BURNS

BORN IN A SMALL DIDGERIDOO IN VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, IN 1972, Shane Watts is: six-time Australian Enduro Champion, Australian 500cc Motocross Champion, 1997 World Enduro Champion, 1998 International Six Day Enduro Overall Champion and 2000 AMA Grand National Cross Country Champion. The man knows his way around a dirtbike, and he shares his knowledge at the Shane Watts Dirtwise Academy, which travels all around the U.S.

Last February found me at one of Watts' schools in Victorville, California, riding a borrowed Husqvarna TE250 Low. (Awesome. Why don't more manu facturers offer an off-road bike that doesn't require you to displace your hip joint every time you get on?)

Watts begins the training by having students follow one of the principles that savvy racers already know: To go fast, we must first learn to go slow. To do this, we stand up and balance and drag the rear brake against the clutch and have slow races across a tiny sec tion of a big, flat Mojave plain. Turn the bars into the direction you're falling but don't fall. Hold the clutch at its fric tion point, gently balanced against the rear brake. Remember that when you're picking your way through the rock gar den at Erzberg and you'll be fine.

Afraid of ruts? Do you slow down and paddle along with your feet? That won't do. From a standing start with both wheels in a six-inch-deep, 50-footlong rut, we practice drag-race starts: Gas it through the rut with your feet on the pegs, and if you start to fall left, turn your bars in that direction. The magic of spinning knobbies in the rut will pull you upright again (I crashed a couple of times anyway, misidentifying to which side I was toppling). The faster you go, the better it works.

That's one of the key points of Wattsy's off-road riding catechism: The faster you go, the easier it is. Momentum allied with confident execu tion can carry you through many tight spots. (The corollary to that is the faster you go, the greater the consequences of getting it wrong.) Frightened and stuck on a steep (to me) hill, I am made to realize I've only got the throttle halfway open. Whack it and we scamper right up. "When in doubt, gas it" isn't really a joke off-road.

Braking is key also. First, let's practice locking the front on purpose to imprint that feel, says Wattsy-the feel of your

sphincter slamming shut. An amazing thing about the desert floor is that while it offers none of the grip of pavement, it does provide every bit of the impact.

Which leads to our stoppies and wheelies drills. It's all about using your timing and the bike's springs to gently but abruptly mash the knobs into the sur face. Wattsy makes it all look effortless. Then there's the donut-spinning drill, which leads to the two-cone drill, the rut ted turn, the flat turn, the grinding drill. Grinding? At most of his schools, Wafts finds telephone poles or logs, front wheel on one side, rear wheel on the othet Now ride. This is an important skill for pull ing yourself out of a rut or side-hilling. In the Mojave, where there is no wood (the weekend warriors have burned every

Shane Watts has no magic pill. What he has is a blueprint for exercises which, performed repetitively over many hours, might lead you to someday be able to keep up with him.

JEFF ALLEN

BE A BETTER RIDER

scrap, and they even stole our orange cones while we broke for lunch on Day 2), we find dirt shoulders at the side of the dirt road to scuttle along.

At the end of my two days, I learned what I already knew: Shane Watts has no magic pill. What he has is a blueprint for exercises which, performed repetitively over many hours, might lead you to some-

day be able to keep up with him (10,000 hours might do it, according to Outliers).

We must leave our comfort zone gradually. Enduro riding is a crazy sport filled with unknown obstacles that can appear instantly; the only thing the ex pert knows that the rest of us don't is that he will deal confidently with what ever comes up. Shane Watts has flesh-

colored buckets of confidence, and one of the things you're paying for is the hope that a little of his might rub off on you over the course of these two days.

For school schedules, pricing ($380 for most two-day schools) and lots of great videos, riding tips, etc., go to www.shanewatts.com.