A guide to dirt-jumping

From ArticleWorld

Dirt-jumping is a traditional game, something similar to the Olympic sport of long jump. This sport requires no extra padding, safety goggles or expensive equipment, it can be done in the back yard. It is also unfairly biased towards tall people.

Getting started

Gather a group of jump-minded friends, and find somewhere with loose dirt, preferably in a dry spot. Jumping into mud is no fun, and slipping over before you jump can be embarrassing and painful.

Jump, and measure your distance. Get some friends to jump, and measure them. Do this several times. Work out your average jumps like this: sum of the distances jumped divided by the number of jumps.

Then, at one end of the jumping spot, make a small hill of dirt, about 45 cm wide. This is the ‘Dirt pile’. From this spot, measure your average jumping distance, and mark this measurement parallel to the ‘dirt pile’. This is your ‘jump point’.

From this point, jump as hard as you can towards the ‘dirt pile’. If you land in the ‘pile’, you have ‘dirt-jumped’. Now your friends can do the same. Simple!

Hints

To perform good jumps, bend your knees before take-off. You should also bend your knees on landing. This helps brace the body against injury, and also helps you to keep your balance. You can vary the kinds of jump that you do. After your standing jump (the sort described above), try a ‘running start’. This kind of jump should give you extra power, and you should be careful not to overshoot.

‘Running start’ jumping is not always accepted by experienced players, so if you are in a crowd, make sure that you all agree what kinds of jumps are allowed.

Be careful to jump safely. Examine where you intend to play before you jump, and watch out for hidden dangers. Watch out for broken glass in the soil, and be sure that you will have a safe landing if you miss the dirt pile.