WORDS: Eve Lawrence
PHOTOS: Ben Wilkins
FIRST TIME
TRAIL RIDER
Dirt bike novice Eve Lawrence explains what it’s
like to do your first trail ride.
oday’s letter is D… For ‘Dirt’ bike!
Having never ridden off-road
before, I have to say I was super
nervous about taking part in an
organised trail bike ride. The guys at KR
have all ridden dirt bikes when they were
kids and there are a number of multiple
NZ champions in various dirt disciplines.
And I’ve heard a load of injury stories,
left, right and centre from all of them,
so you can imagine it was easy to work
myself up over riding a dirt bike for
the first time. In this case the scene for
popping my dirt bike cherry was with
Endless Dirtbiking at their South Head
trail ride, near Auckland.
“
I felt tense and nervous
as I looked ahead and felt
the bike wriggle around
underneath me. It’s a very
different feeling to riding
on the road where the bike
doesn’t move around at all
Ben, the editor, drove us up to South
Head with KR’s long term KTM 300EXC
on the trailer – way too feisty for me –
and Tony Beuth from Endless Dirtbiking
said he’d have a Honda CRF230 waiting
for me. I was super keen but really quite
nervous.
First though, I needed to be shown the
very basic ropes. I’ve been riding on the
road for 13 years on a variety of bikes
from the oil-cooled Bandit 1200 to a
CBR900RR Fireblade. As for dirt bikes, I’m
literally a complete dirt bike novice. After
signing on, Tony took me to one side
in a quiet area with no other riders to
work on some basic skills; how to stand,
how to position my arms and fingers
etc. Armed with the basic rules he sent
me off around a figure of eight loop with
the following words “Every time you use
more than two fingers on the levers, you
owe me a dollar…”.
It might seem silly to those of you who’ve
been riding for years, but just riding
around the course Tony marked out for
me was nerve wracking! I felt tense and
nervous as I looked ahead and felt the
bike wriggle around underneath me.
It’s a very different feeling to riding on
the road where the bike doesn’t move
around at all. Needless to say I was short
of a few pennies once we’d finished that
little lesson... but I’d had fun.
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KIWI RIDER 53