Over these past two years, I’ve spent a lot of time on the trials bike. When I first took up the sport, I didn’t expect it to consume my life; I merely expected it to allow me to better my riding skills on larger bikes. 

Almost immediately, I found my skills improving on ADV and dirtbikes: I was looking ahead and at potential lines on the road or trail that I wouldn’t have noticed before, thinking more about where my front tire would be placed and had a better understanding of how to use my suspension. Trials riding trains you to hone in on every aspect of movement and input you put into the bike. Because of its light weight and torquey demeanour, everything is amplified through the bike; too much throttle and you’ll loop out the motorcycle. Unbalanced weight distribution can cause you to fall, and improper clutching or braking can cause you to mess up any line you decide to try. 

If you look up trials, you’ll likely see videos of pros like Toni Bou or Dougie Lampkin jumping onto massive obstacles and achieving rides that don’t look to be humanly possible. However, that’s not what trials are all about. It’s about assessing the terrain, down to every root in the ground or every knot on the smallest log. 

Here’s how trials competitions work. It’s scored like a game of golf: lowest points win. A section is a technically laid-out piece of trail, or obstacles that offer challenges in all facets of riding, from off-camber turns to logs and rocks to large rock faces and ramps. When you enter the section in which you are competing, every time you touch a foot to the ground or obstacle you get one point, with a maximum of three total points in a section (so if you put your foot down five times, you will still only gain three points). However, if you drop the bike, stall the bike or go outside of the section parameters, you’ll have gained a total of five points instantly. 

In each section, riders make their way through gaining zero to five points. In a day, riders will normally do two or three loops of all the sections, giving them a chance to improve their score on each loop. The competition is purely against yourself, although there may be other riders in any given class you enter. It’s best to keep yourself calm and ride your best ride. 

Trials allow you to make any terrain into a playground — it’s like parkour for the moto-addicted mind. I was hooked and committed my 2024 summer to attending as many competitions as possible. If I couldn’t get out for a proper ride, I would practice standing or balancing drills in a parking lot and soon found all my spare time taken up with trials riding.

Last November, I decided to put my skills to the test at the Canadian National Trials Championship in Victoria, B.C. It was the toughest course I had ridden — an area with endless rock and steep climbs. And did I mention that, because of the abundance of rain, everything was slick as cow crap? Luckily, I walked away with fourth overall in Canada women’s. 

After that, on a whim, I applied for the Canadian Trials Team to attend an international event called the Trials des Nations (TdN). And I made the team! Along with two other women and three men, I was chosen to help represent our country at the TdN 2025 held in Italy this September. The TdN began in 1984 and is known as “The Olympics of Trials,” bringing together teams from around 23 countries each year. 

Now comes another challenge: because motorcycling is not recognized as an official sport by the government it means that we, as a team, are responsible for fundraising to be able to travel to the TdN this September. So here is the begging portion of my column: if you would like to contribute to our fundraising efforts, you can go to our GoFundMe page, by heading to GoFundMe.com and searching Canada 2025 trials team. Regardless of whether or not you’d like to contribute, I hope you’ll help keep the team spirit up and follow along our journey competing in the 2025 Trials des Nations this September. 

Lastly, I hope you can turn this page in our publication with a newfound curiosity about trials riding. Please look it up and enjoy the things that these riders can do — or at least enjoy watching them fall off their bikes and get right back up. If you’re looking to improve your motorcycle skills, I encourage you to reach out to your local trials club or get a trials bike yourself.