By: Jason Giacchino
Email: offthepegs@atvsource.com

Ode To The Practice Track

An important factor in me and my riding buddies' ability to win races (or lose them then lie about the results) has been the formation of our practice track, a once flat section of an abandoned field that now bares the deep brown scars of countless pounded laps. For an aspect of training with such importance, it only seems fitting to share with you, the readers, the epic tale of its origin, its creation process, the fine tuning of the rhythm sections, and of the mathematical precision required to design the jumps and corresponding landings accordingly. Unfortunately, like our race results, this would require a little exaggeration of the truth, a couple of fibs, and one or two blatant lies. The truth, albeit much less dramatic, is that my track began its existence when my parents (and house-mates/landlords at the time) had finally reached the breaking point in my rutting up their yard and threatened to throw me out of the house with a catchy quote to the effect of if the ruts didn't vanish, I would. But I digress, back to the point- Such gentle persuasion had sent me searching for a piece of suitable land in which my racing buddies and I could go all out, allowing our lack of skill to end our day's riding session rather then my clothing being placed in plastic garbage bags and scattered throughout the front yard. I selected an ideal location far away from the homestead, a flat grassy field that with years worth of an entire lack of maintenance had been overtaken with sumac clusters and towering dandelions that made the the lyrics to Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds seem oddly relate-able.

Months of dread and planning went into the project, then days and a few more hours of back-braking intensive labor followed. Most of which had stemmed from transporting the bush-hog over to the field, pull starting it in the direct sun then refueling it, sometimes several times in one day. Once the aspiring jungle had been tamed, it was a matter of actually using our quads to cut lines into the hardened turf, laying down the outline literally as we rode. As much as I would like to pool this into the category of track research and development, it really was a well needed opportunity to blast some roost without fearing packing my bags afterward.

Once the foundation had been laid, it was a matter of transporting some much needed soil to the scene intended to be worked into magnificent doubles, tabletops, and whoop sections. My cousin Scott was in charge of soil acquisition and somehow, considering the fact that dirt is probably one of the most abundant resources available on earth, wound up paying several hundred dollars for 2 truck loads of the stuff. Upon inspection of the delivery it was immediately apparent that Scott had ordered some top quality planting soil, this was bad for two primary reasons: 1) It was nearly as expensive as gold, which made me wonder if we weren't supposed to sift through it with tiny screens before using it to launch ourselves skyward and 2) Its consistency was light and pure, making it virtually un-packable.

To add to the drama, Scott had the trucks dump the loads in the wrong locations and with an apparent lack of heavy equipment at our disposal, meant mounds of soil in all the wrong regions of the track. True resourceful engineers, we didn't let this slow us down and decided that it would be easier to reconfigure our lines than to move the planting soil, one shovelful at a time.

Like erosion, the track slowly began to develop over time. With the aid of some truly motivated BMX riders, many shovels, a wheelbarrow (that my cousin Mike managed to endo and crash in spectacular fashion in front of the neighborhood kids) and some good old fashioned elbow grease we had ourselves a pretty slick practice track. The first mound of brown-gold was transformed into a tabletop with a left-ward twisting landing that requires a good dose of timing to land properly and the second into a 45 foot double that gets its share of oohs and aahhs from untrained spectators who've never seen anything bigger.

Whoops were carefully dug out and assisted by mother nature and her raindrops, kicker jumps, and small rhythm sections have been popping up all over thanks to repeated laps of relentless pounding.

It's been nearly seven years now since we began the project, and considering our budget each season (somewhere around $0), we've been fortunate enough to continue adding new obstacles and arrangements to its solid foundation. Unfortunately, its almost like starting over each year as our jumps are immediately overtaken by clumps of weeds, sumac stalks, and thorns that have to be painstakingly removed before any riding is to be attempted. This bothersome phenomenon was puzzling at first until we realized that Scotty was to blame. Whether or not our lap times or race results have improved as a result of our track is yet to be determined, however, one thing is for certain: Planting soil really does work.