So, around a year after booking the Fundamentals course (postponements due to my fractured elbow and the Atherton’s having a awesome season - how dare they! 
)…..
Late Saturday afternoon, (in true to form - last minute-ness) I decided to give the bike I was going to use for the following days Athertons training a quick once over as I’ve not used in a while (using singlespeed only recently). Rear brake pads worn and swapped. Bottom bracket super rough and stiff not quite seized but nearly …mmmmm not good.
I happened to have a spare Acros Orange Clockwork and bobbed over to Seb’s for help fitting (thanks Seb!). Bike sorted.
Arrived in Llandelga at 9am-ish and filled in the necessary legal disclaimer and inhaled coffee, I’d not been to Llandegla before (even though its the closest trail centre to me and been to all others in mid and North Wales) - nice cafe. Over to the classroom and met my fellow students (4 others in all) and tutors - Bob from One Planet Adventure, Dan and Rachel Atherton.
We introduced ourselves and discussed what we wanted to achieve from the course. The other pupils had come from a more DH oriented background than myself (I’ve only been to one ‘proper’ DH track before and that was to watch a comp. at Innerleithen) and they were all kitted up with big DH bikes (Iron Horse Sunday, Commencal Supreme DH, etc) and initially felt slightly under biked with my hardtail Gary Fisher GED.
Hidden DH
We left the cafe and rode up a couple of km to a hidden Downhill section nestled in the woods. Rachel drove their truck up as she is still recovering from her nasty roadie crash in the US so was sans bike. The section we started with was a steep-ish, wet, rooty descent into a righthand berm and a pretty much immediate (to me anyway) lefthander.
We concentrated on breaking the decent down into small subsections (cue some fluorescent cones) getting one part right and moving on to the next, not been overly concerned with speed but just trying to keep things smooth and precise and thinking about body position. I’m used to just blatting down rocky descents in a untidy way and not really thinking about things too much , so I found visualizing the subsections once there were a few racked up quite difficult and unnatural.
On each push back up we got feedback on the run, Bob was also filming each of us to critique later and Dan giving us demos on what we were doing wrong and how it should be done - bloody hell, I know its stating the obvious but he is FAST !
Dan Atherton showing us how its done
Drops
We then moved on to look at drops, I initially thought we might be starting small and working up to something bigger, nope, the BIG drop that was adjacent to the run was it, I’d been eyeing it up earlier, thinking I wouldn’t want to attempt that and really didn’t think it would be part of the course, the landing was steep it made the drop look pretty intimidating (to a XC jeyboy!). A quick demo from Dan and instruction from Bob and Rachel and the first of us plopped off, I think I was the third one to do it, I was surprised how easy it felt and how soft the landing was. And had another couple of goes, ace!
All five of our group did the drop and we swaggered triumphantly over to the next section.
Off Camber, wet, rootyness
A very steep run into a short but extremely rooty off camber descent through the trees. I wouldn’t have spotted the line without it been pointed out to us which dropped into a hole before climbing up the camber avoiding the bigger roots before dropping back between two trees. After a bars + tree incident, I managed to clear it dab free on my 3rd attempt, again I think most of group cleaned it and quite a bit of crashing was involved - was good fun.
It then started to hail and we headed back down the hill for some grub - I have never felt hail like it in my life, actually painful and was envious of those in full-facers and goggles.
Back in the classroom happily stuffing our faces and slurping coffee Bob went through the video footage taken earlier in all its big screen glory. It was easy to see where the mistakes were been made watching yourself back frame by error ridden frame, advice and improvements were dolled out. It was a really good format doing this over lunch continuing to learn as we ate.
Same but different
Under an hour later and we were back at the DH run which now looked completely transformed under a layer of snow. We then were pretty much given free reign on repeating the sections we had done in the morning and trying to put into practice the lessons learnt from viewing the video. The snow defiantly made things more interesting due to the run looking different than it had a few hours earlier. Dan, Rachel and Bob were watching our runs and giving us advice and encouragement. In my case to keep off the brakes really lean into the berm and look for the the exit, although still not completely nailing it I felt I much more confident.
Whoop!
We descended the off camber section once more and popped out in a clearing in the forest and out onto a pump track which contained a set of doubles leading to a hip jump into a steep berm and big ’step up jump’ (don’t know the technical name for it but it was a jump that partly up a slope).
I’ve had a ‘play’ at a pump track before at Glentress and more recently Dalby forest and was (very) pretty awful on both occasions.
We started with the doubles (still snowing) and after some demos from Dan, gave it a go I was surprised that I was not all that bad at them. We moved on to the hip jump into the steep berm and finally the big step up jump. All good fun and everyone seemed to gain confidence quickly