help!- bike handling skills

On a downhill, take your knees and clamp your top tube.  this will stabalize you.

If you want to slow down just a bit, sit up and let the wind hit your chest.  Basically creating a sail to slow down a bit.  And feather your brakes instead of applying them hard.  This is a good way to "scrub" speed and stay in control. 

And most of all, stay relaxed.  If you tense up, you will feel every bump and it will feel like you're going out of control.  The bike will do it's thing.

And practice, practice, practice.

What he said ... and would add that you should look 25-50 feet in front of you, not directly in front of your wheel.

By looking further down the road, you are giving yourself time to process what you see and distribute that information to the rest of your body.  If you are looking in front of your wheel then you will quickly "overload" and therefore not have the opportunity to react to whatever obstacle you might come across. 

Sometimes the body responds to being overloaded by over reacting ... which might also cause wobbliness (think: trying to make minute turns of the handle bars with your adrenaline pumping).

Another thing to consider is to stand on the pedals while going around sharp corners. This not only creates wind resistence, but also raises your center of gravity (therefore allowing for more of a lean into the apex of the curve) as well as the ability to use your stabilizer muscles in your legs to help control the bike.

I've used the above methods in descending the Gaps in Dahlonega last weekend ... so much so that I did a good portion of the descent of Woody's, Wolf Pen and Neel's in my aerobars.

Exactly as stated above.  I think the most important thing is to stay relaxed.  You can ask anyone that I ride with I am a pansy on downhills (luckily I catch them on the next uphill).  However, after riding in VT a lot last year, I became better and the biggest thing that helped me was to be able to relax and not have a death grip on the bike.  Once you relax the bike can kind of float under you and you just cruise.

Also, I find that in the beginning of the year it takes a few rides for me to get comfortable at speed again.  I have been out about a 4-5 times for extended rides this year and am already feeling much more comfortable than I was the first time out.

Adios
Dave

Great posts- I never really put any technique into descents. I think I was also gripping the front brake too much. It almost seemed that the carbon stem was flexing with the wobble making it worse, although it could have been mental on my part because i was staring down the front wheel at that point. I have made that same decent at least a dozen times- so it was my own handling issues, not the road. I thought maybe the wheel was not true, but that wasn't the case. I think I will do some hill repeats and focus on practicing the descents and use the techniques that you guys submitted. I think locking the legs on the top tube, scanning further ahead, and a more relaxed grip may help alleviate some of those issues.

Ummm, could be the road, mechanical, or it just could be.   How? Riders going downhill can experience 'speed wobble', and it's scariest ever, 'cause there isn't much you can do about it.  Here's the wiki on it, but there's an article on Sheldon Brown that turns it into a bit more English.

If it were me, I'd check (like the other posters said) for major mechanicals (like wheels out of true, brake rubbing, skewer not completely fastened, something on your tire, etc) and obvious issues with the road, but if it's not either of these, it could very well be a wobble.  One sure way to find out is to do the same hill at different speed, or a different hill, same speed.  Then you'll know (most likely).

And there's nothing to do but gently slow and ride a wobble out, braking until the undampened vibration of you and the bike breaks.  And hope you can.  Glad you came through the downhill unscathed....