Soup to nuts: dipping a toe into the deep end

Nobody told me it would go like this.

Now, I didn’t actually ask anyone what mountain bike racing would be like. But still nobody told me shit. Nevertheless, in the moment before we hit the singletrack that would go on for the next 15-miles of the 36-mile Prickly Pedal Mountain Bike Race, I realized I probably should’ve. I had no clue what I was about to do, and I was sure I was about to do a lot of it wrong.

Prickly Pedal is a 36-mile point to point mountain bike ride from Cave Creek to Lake Pleasant on the Maricopa Trail north of Phoenix. Racing in January is strange, but with an Arizona it is the most wonderful time of year to suffer on some singletrack. What’s more, this year feels like a ticking clock to get in racing while the getting is good before the monster that is the Arizona summer comes rumbling around. All of this brought me to a brisk Sunday morning start line with a few hundred other folks to take the next step on my Soup to Nuts journey this season from being a mountain bike novice to lining up at elite level races. Let’s call this phase two of the plan.

In the end I managed second place overall which was a fair result for my first time racing flat bars. Yet, I was still disappointed thinking about the low hanging fruit that took me out of a great shot at a victory. I have had a few second-place finishes in my career but really only a couple wins, so it always stings when it's close, even if my expectation heading into the race was not a victory. As I was riding back to the start last week, I tried my best to articulate what my takeaways should be from a race that was entirely built as a learning experience.

Here were the three that persisted:

Five lessons from my first mountain bike race

1. Tires: love them or hate them, rubber is unavoidable

I really thought I would get away without thinking about tires much on my first race. I really thought I could just make a choice based upon what I had and it would be immaterial to the outcome of my day. Typing that out now makes it sound painfully obvious that line of thinking is flawed, but I came in naive, hoping my choice would work out.

It took one downhill to know I would be cursing my choice around literally every turn. Pirelli Scorpion XC tires, as it turns out, isn’t no friend of mine. 2.2 inches of inflexible, small, and low-profile knobs weren’t going to cut it. Not even a little bit.

I skated through most of the race well enough, but I was lagging on the exits of more sharp turns as I didn’t have the purchase and the confidence to keep the speed through the loose dirt, sand and rocks that made up the rough stretches of the Maricopa Trail that hadn’t seen a lick of water since the summer. When it was time to settle the win, the real limitations of the tire came out as my competitor just absolutely smoked me on a fast and loose descent on the south end of Lake Pleasant. A three-minute descent produced a 15 second gap and it was all over.

The frustrating thing about it was I knew the right choice from the start, I just refused to believe in it. I have been riding Phoenix area trails since November with the same type of tire: Vittoria Mezcals. I had spent hundreds of miles on plenty of different surfaces enjoying the predictable, yet unspectacular, cheap tires. I even had a new set ready to use! But I thought I could be cheeky. I thought I knew better.

I had the old mentality that has gotten me into trouble time and time again in gravel racing where the idea of a tire as being faster, especially over the easier portions of the course, wipes away the rational thinking that suggests a better, more capable option for the tougher portions. Often this yields flats, and while the air stayed in the tire this time, in mountain biking it's obvious to me after just one poor race selection that a weak tire choice is an equivalent death sentence, especially as my technique is already my relative weak point.

2. Race against yourself rather than others

I hate time trials, and I avoid them like the plague. My aversion to time trials often means I don’t make plans for races, and I don’t have a set pacing structure. I go on vibes and grinta. Yet, mountain biking can and should change that. With a set course that will always produce attack points and sections to manage based on my strengths, pre-race plans have got to be rock solid.

As much as I balk at this from the lens of being a hater of all things time trial, the importance of plotting out a mountain bike race and reflecting on what went right versus the things that went wrong, all of it has been comprehensible through my actions almost in a vacuum. It is liberating to realize that very little of mountain bike races is dependent on what the people around you are getting up to. Outside of the start, where it is undoubtedly a shit fight to get as far up the pecking order as possible into the first pinch point, the racing allows for any rider to control their own variables and shape a race plan that suits their strengths.

The interesting change that I felt from gravel or road racing to mountain bikes was the importance of the mistake management. These pre-race plans — whether it is a pacing strategy, technical choice, or even pre riding — is incredibly dependent upon managing to make the least number of cumulative errors for the duration of the race. Some are big — crashing, flatting, bonking — while other are small — aerodynamic error, bad tire choice, or too many conservative lines. But all of it is important and all of it stacks up like a scoreboard. At the end of the race, when it’s time to actually beat the other people in the event, that metaphorical tally will tell the tale.

3. Repetition is the beating heart of technique

In line with planning and racing oneself, mountain biking has taught me just how much I can learn through the repetition of terrain. Both in the context of racing (I pre-rode the main technical portion of the course twice) and in training, mountain biking reps are the ticket. Nothing comes close to taking on the same terrain and sequences of features as a way to learn the micro-lessons that come from eeking out speed iteratively. And then doing that month after month to hit those points home.

Yes, new terrain is fantastic, exhilarating and adventure is why we do it – but familiarity is the elixir of speed.

What has hit this point home is a spooky feeling that keeps sneaking up on me. Late at night, from time to time, I will get a flash of a crash. It's not a full image, it's just a flash, but I always end up with a rush of adrenaline as my mental self is flying through the air after making a crucial mistake on an unknown trail. It's as if my subconscious is suggesting the doom that can come at any time if I am not diligent.

Instead of scaring me, those visions have reinforced the importance of repetition, of getting things right before branching out, and of never fully sending it into the unknown. Boyed in part by those subliminal reminders of what can go wrong, I have been able to stay motivated to do the work in the most methodical way: by doing it over and over again and only accelerate when I have the rational confidence that my technical skill is matched with the range of outcomes from separate approaches. Through that iterating, I have made huge strides in my riding, even away from my well-trodden ground. There is a trickle-down effect that comes from the training, because caution slowly gets faster when those skills are reinforced over time.

While I intuitively found this to be true through things like Strava data, racing made it crystal clear. In the race format, where the effort was higher and the course was less familiar, I had to be relatively cautious. Riding uphill could be at 100% effort, but downhill never could be 100% sending. My speed and my ability to stress the competitors around me was all about my speed at 80-90% intensity. That level is only found through the muscle memory of repetition. Fortunately, in that regard I think I am already on the right track.