NZ MTB RALLY - DOWNHILL ENDURO RACE
I’m not going to lie, downhill MTB has always been a part of cycling that has been intimidating to a roadie like me.
For all of my career I was working on skills on narrow (then later on slightly fatter…) tyres. But one of the things that I really love about cycling is how diverse all of the disciplines can be.
I could find my way to the front of a high-speed peloton when a hundred and eighty guys were fighting to be there or get back onto the peloton on a long mountain descent - believe me, this is never more valuable than the Andorra stage of the Vuelta!
But as you all know, in the past few years since stopping racing as a pro on the road, I’ve spent a lot of time learning skills on an MTB. For a roadie, the most natural format is to dive into MTB XC. Cross country is a bit more natural to someone who thinks cycling is all about pedalling and being up at your threshold.
Gradually you stop braking at the wrong times (and then braking at all) and learn to get to grips with crossing rock gardens, berms and the like. But the final frontier of the MTB has been the pure test of skills that is Downhill MTB.
It isn’t only the technical aspects of the sport that are a shift, but also there is a huge cultural difference between the focused mindset of a road racer, where you have few friends and (let’s be honest) a lot of rivals, to the more relaxed and community-minded sport of mountain biking.
MTB Enduro in particular couldn’t be further from road racing. For those that don’t yet know Enduro is a format where pedalling and sweating uphill gets you basically nothing (those bits aren’t even timed as part of the race) and where everything is about how you drop down those descents and how you handle your bike over the stuff that really puts the shits up you!
Of course, I wanted to throw my hat in and have a crack at all of this. After spending some time learning the skills I’d need with ex-world champion in the MTB Eliminator, Paul Van Der Ploeg and Kiwi talent Matt Fairbrother (you can listen to that here), I wanted to test my limits off-road and to experience what it is to be part of the MTB Enduro community. What better way then to have a go at all this than entering in one of the toughest and best MTB Enduro races, the NZ MTB Rally.
The NZ MTB Rally is a six-day event down around Nelson on the South Island of New Zealand. Each day is divided up into between four and seven ‘stages’ - these are the timed downhill sections, and between those sections, you are riding at your own speed (within a time limit).
Between stages, you are back to base camp for beers and dinner with everyone else in the race. To get to the stages is in itself a journey - either flying, sailing or driving up to the next start point.
It’s pretty cool, not just to have dinner with the other competitors but also to head to the start each day with the whole mixed bag of people taking part in the event. It has the feel of everyone doing something together as opposed to just trying to hammer each other on the road.
I loved that everyone was happy to share tips, and it was really great to hear the good guys talk. Most of the time it was reassuring to hear they found the same parts difficult as me - they were just going a lot faster!
The stages are colour-coded in difficulty, the runs are either; blue, black diamond or double black diamond. As you can guess these get more difficult - this isn’t a race for the totally uninitiated and the trails range from flowy single track to some tighter, steeper and rockier downhills that test even the best. The hardest adjustments were what I call the Nelson Corners! Vertical switchbacks that took me way out of my comfort zone.
The real beauty of riding the routes blind was that I was on things before I had any real time to worry about them, I was just halfway down a vertical drop and I’d think - well, I’m doing this now! The trail itself just pushes you to be better and not worry, and you get so much faster just by doing. You just flowed and worried about it later.
The trails in this part of the world are pretty much second to none. New Zealand has an amazing MTB culture and the national parks that border the area of the race are like an MTB Mecca. I’m not going to lie this was a real test for my skills, and I found the going mentally and physically tiring. But for all of the nerves and stress around getting it right on the harder sections the payback was always there and it was well worth it. Just as I’d be on the edge of asking myself what I was doing there I’d find myself letting the bike run and just enjoying some incredible downhill.
Above all else, what Ill take from the event was the people that I met and bonded with there. There is a whole community of Enduro racers travelling around the world to what is known as the Trans-Enduro race series and these guys absolutely love their mountain biking. The beauty of the length of the event was that in time you found the people who were around your level and instead of trying to get one up on each other we formed a few party trains and did the downhills together. As you can hear on the pod - teaming up with others was an awesome way to experience what we were all doing.
Honestly, the NZ MTB Rally left me buzzing. I was way out of my comfort zone, but I was in great company and in an amazing place. I left thinking I had ridden way better than I expected, I’d met and got to know a whole bunch of new faces, and wanted a little bit more - the perfect way to end up, I reckon.
If you haven’t already, check out the pod. It was great to be out on the road again and I hope you all enjoy my take on this adventure.
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