Gang,

Hill climbing is an art....no doubt about it. Into our Yahoo kickbiking group's "files" section, I've uploaded a short video clip named:

Edg walking up a 12 degree hill.WMV

It shows a simple technique for practicing hills that is also a perfect practicing of the basic Trikke move.

To estimate the angle of the hill I show myself climbing up, I resorted to pacing off the hill's length and estimating the height difference and then plotting it on a graph and estimating the angle. Arrrgh. 12 degrees is just an estimate.

I found my hill climbing ability to suddenly improve by practicing this technique slowly. Yep, slowly again.

The clip's technique "burns in" your body's muscle memory for going up a hill. It's two footed trikking -- that means, always take the non-carving foot completely off the footpad. I find that I can basically walk "one step at a time" up a hill by this method. This gets your weight out of the way, and by such practice, eventually you'll find that you don't have to take your foot completely off, and your non-carving foot will be, from then on, basically just having a nice feather light touch on that non-carving footpad. The carves are very small, and the weight shifts don't have to be coming any faster than ordinary footfalls while walking, but the handlebar turn must be very precisely in time with the weight shifts since you're only carving about one to two feet in distance before you have to carve the other way.

It's a big file to download, almost 3 megs, hope everyone has broadband.

Edg