This evening I went over to Trow again and net up with my friend and his daughter and we did some flat skills and took some measurements.
As expected my flat manuals are terrible, as are my pedal manuals AND my bunny hops 🤣 As you can see from the table below I have a long way to go!
| Date | Manual (m) | Pedal Manual (m) | Bunny hop (cm) |
| 09/12/2021 | 2.4 | 4.4 | 25
|
As a rough guide we looked at the qualification standards for the Regional School of Racing (11-15 year olds) which are:
Flat Manual:
Boys = 7m
Girls = 3m
Pedal Manual:
Boys = 14m
Girls = 3m
50m Sprint:
Boys = Under 7 seconds
Girls = Under 7.5 seconds
Bunny Hop:
Boys = 30cm +
Girls = 15cm +
At the moment the only category that I am better than the minimum qualification is sprints where I have a time of 6.591 seconds which is almost half a second faster than the minimum requirement.
So for the rest of the month I am going to work on my flat skills to try and get them to a level where if I were between 11-15 years old I would be able to make the RSR program.
I have set a short term goal for the 31/12/2021 of getting my manuals over 7m (Increase of 4.6m), My Pedal manuals over 14m (Increase of 9.6m) and my bunny hops over 30cm (5cm increase).
| Date | Manual (m) | Pedal Manual (m) | Bunny hop (cm) |
| 09/12/2021 | 2.4 | 4.4 | 25 |
| Goals | 7 | 14 | 30 |
| Improvement needed | 4.6 | 9.6 | 5 |
To reach this goal starting Saturday I will spend 30-60 minutes a day practicing each if these skills with cones laid out showing the distance needed to achieve. I will also get a bike on the rollers and practice getting in the correct manual position as at the moment I am standing way too upright which is hurting my manual a lot! On a positive note I was consistently getting the front wheel off of the ground and holding a manual for over 2m every time so that is an improvement over the last time I tried practicing manuals where. I struggled to get the front wheel off of the ground without pulling with my arms!
I also think that my flexibility is hurting my flat skills as I struggle to get low on manuals and pedal manuals so I am going to start stretching in the evenings after work.
I swapped my clips out for flats last night so I am now going to leave the flats on unless I am racing to get used to riding flats again over the winter. Flat pedals are better for learning to pedal in smooth circles which is the fastest way to pedal so riding flats in the winter is used to undo all of the bad habits from riding clipless pedals during the season.
I have the day off tomorrow so I am planning to go to the track and work on my jumping on the tabletop to try and get to a stage where I can try and jump the last jump on the 3rd straight as it is something that I should be able to do as I can easily manual the jump which is usually the marker of if you can jump a jump or not. I am not jumping well at the moment due to a mental block so I need to practice jumping more to clear the block and start sending jumps again!