Best Place to Practice Drops

The 10m height doesn't scare me, the water does. I spend most of my time 30ft up on a ladder 40hrs a week at work, so height doesn't really scare me. But when it comes to diving so much can go wrong(at least that's what my kines course programmed me to think).
Compare to when i bike and fall at highspeed, i usually roll out in one piece.
Before this season i could only huck 5ft. IMHO when you first begin, tranny's scare the livinbg shit out of people, because it gives the illusion that the drop is bigger than it is. What i found helpful was doing4-6ft to flat, over and over again, then going cliff diving w/ my friends, and it really helped. A controlled flat drop prepares you for the impact, and the technique(how to stay leveled in the air etc), the cliff prepares you for the speed, airtime, fear, confidence.

I think biking is all about proper technique and confidence, like anything else.
Biking isn't physically demanding, unless you race competitively, or ride uphill. if you ask anyone who's railed an A-line drop or a step down on garbonzo, they will say that it feels less harsh then doing a 3 feet to flat(unless they overshot it).
The best way to learn is to train someone.

buy a bike with bigger shocks!

Utah Baby!

Make sure there's a couple of friends with cameras.

Cameras are great for upping the courage factor. Plus you'll have pictures to look at while you're healing.

Camera = Yard Sale, in my experience anyway :).

To the OP, if you have not tried Natural High on Fromme, give it a go. There are four different styles of drop that you can try, each vary in hight from just under 3 foot to 4 foot. The easiest is a small drop onto the back of a rock roller coaster, after the big A frame. The only trick with this small drop is NOT TO LOOK AT THE TREE (trust me on this one).

Also as already mentioned, Floppy Bunny is a great place to practice small jumps and to build "air time" confidence on trails. It also runs into NH and provides a great warm up for the drops on the trail.

Good luck.

Thanks for all the tips. I think I'll try to get to Fromme some time this week.

On Saturday I did 5 runs on Cypress and made some pretty good advances. Conditions were perfect.

Double Post

I highly recommend the drops in the Poco bike park as an excellent place to build up your confidence in your drops. A friend of mine who had broken their wrist doing a drop a couple years back doing a drop was totally spooked about drops despite having more than enough skill to handle them.

So I took him to Poco bike park (just off of Shaunassy (sp?)) and got him to do the drops there over and over again. After he got his confidence up with a couple easy runs off the green drop before I knew it he was doing the black drop without a seconds thought and ever since has been just fine on drops up to and including 8 feet.

The drops there are built such that even if you go off them at a crawl and darn near go over the handlebars in the process the tranny is angled such that you pull it off looking like you meant to do that.

http://maps.google.ca/?ie=UTF8[HTML_REMOVED]ll=49.275715,-122.775393[HTML_REMOVED]spn=0.005327,0.016522[HTML_REMOVED]z=17

Camera = Yard Sale, in my experience anyway :).

The only trick with this small drop is NOT TO LOOK AT THE TREE (trust me on this one).
Good luck.

Yeah, I've been eyeing that, and I keep riding around it because of that bloody tree! :P sigh, it's not a big drop dangit…must grow a pair!