Intro to Mountain biking - REI outdoor school, Nov 1st

[xeney]

I did one of these REI Outdoor School things (Intro to Road Biking --yes, we used road bikes, but we didn't do any biking on roads, just a paved off-road trail) and it was a total waste of time and money. The main focus was promoting the Novara line of bikes in hopes of making a sale. Hopefully this one is better than the one I went to. They had us stay in the same gear so we didn't even learn shifting expect through lecture and we didn't ride on roads, so we didn't get to learn how to ride with traffic or negotiate stop signs or traffic lights. And, yes, I did voice my disappointment to the instructors (they said I should put my concerns in my evaluation), submitted a detailed evaluation, but never received a response from REI . . .

Huh. I did both the mountain biking and road biking classes a couple of years ago and they were nothing like that. The mountain biking class was fantastic. I rode my own bike, as did about half of the other people. We covered basic skills and had a really good ride. The road biking class was not so great, mostly because the people who had signed up for it had different expectations -- some wanted what you seemed to want, others had no idea how to ride a bike at all. I've noticed that the class descriptions have changed to address that.

In any case, there was no Novara sales pitch and both classes definitely involved changing gears.

[michelem]

Huh. I did both the mountain biking and road biking classes a couple of years ago and they were nothing like that. The mountain biking class was fantastic. I rode my own bike, as did about half of the other people. We covered basic skills and had a really good ride. The road biking class was not so great, mostly because the people who had signed up for it had different expectations -- some wanted what you seemed to want, others had no idea how to ride a bike at all. I've noticed that the class descriptions have changed to address that.

In any case, there was no Novara sales pitch and both classes definitely involved changing gears.

That's really good to hear. Guess I just got a bum class.