By Will Powell
I'm a wreck. My body hurts everywhere - heart racing, lungs thumping, lactic acid rushing through my numbing arms making it harder and harder to hold on to the handlebars.
I stop. Riding any further on this bloody Kawasaki is no longer an option. Struggling, I manage to kick the side stand down before flopping out of the saddle and thumping flat on my back in the mud. What a complete fairy.
Dignity long gone and now overheating in all the gear, I wrestle with my chin strap, yank at my goggles and rip off the crash helmet before gulping in deep breaths of fresh air.
This is pathetic! Before today I thought motocross was a muddy way to have fun in a field, at relatively low speeds. I expected my 'Learn to Motocross' event be pretty easy. At worst we'd cock about in some grassy pasture on a dirt bike - maybe we'd do some jumps.
But now I feel like I've gone ten rounds with Tyson after ten (pretty slow) laps of a lumpy, bumpy, rutted and seriously muddy Wiltshire quagmire.
At this point I should probably explain that my last off-road motorcycling experience was on my local recreation ground aged 15. I was belting about on a peddle-and-pop Honda Cub 90 and while it was thrilling at the time, I don't remember it being this physically challenging or scary.
So perhaps I was being naive. Motocross, I now realise, is one of the most intense challenges of physical endurance, concentration and skill you'll find on two wheels - and it's something you need to take very seriously to be any good at.
First lesson learned then: to do motocross you have to be super fit. Seriously. Despite a few too many motorway service station lunches, I'm not that unfit, but I'm astounded that the pros can race each other in these conditions for 40 minutes at a time.
In fact, my tutor for the day, national champ Mark Hucklebridge, says at the very top of the sport they focus on fitness and core strength as much as they do racing and the bikes. Riders follow similar exercise and diet regimes to professional footballers...
It's not just the physical toll on your body that's a surprise. I came ready to learn a few off-road riding techniques; a bit of extra know how. What I discovered is that to ride fast on mud like these boys do, you need a whole new set of riding skills altogether.
The basics I was taught were to:
- Forget how you ride your road bike(!)
- Stand up on the pegs at all times, get your weight forward over the bars. And work out how to change gears while doing this.
- If you don't want to crash each time you turn, get used to bouncing the bike back up with your foot. This means sticking your leg straight out by the front wheel, and using it to as a support. The front-end will always try to slide out no matter what you do, so you need a stabiliser. Just try not to come off and get your leg trapped under the bike.
- Go fast. And don't worry about the bike squirming around beneath you. If you don't, you won't tear through the mud.
- Don't be scared of jumps. Just make sure your weight is forward when you land and bend your knees.
All of which, I don't mind telling you, proved extremely challenging.
