- It’s great to be in the bush
- There’s more shade then on the road
- It’s so much safer because there are no cars
- I can my dogs because they love coming for a run and there is plenty of water along the way to cool down
- I have the Dungog Common near by and
- It’s an really easy way for higher intensity training – more on this below
You might say that mountain biking is not as safe as riding on the road in regards to having a spill, this is somewhat true but we can limit the chance of having a stack dramatically in two ways:
- Improve our mountain biking skills – we offer an online course here if you’re new to mountain bike riding, which in turn will also make a great improvement to our bike handling skills on the road and
- Choose how we ride the mountain bike trails – please see discussion below.
I have been a mountain bike rider for the last 20 years or so, I was attracted to it because of the reason I listed above but until very recently I have been a mountain bike rider, so basic idea being to be as fast as you can be downhill and across obstacles and getting up the hills as efficient as possible, by no means slow but not riding to hard to be able to keep my focus as high as possible on the downhill sections. Because without great focus you will have a spill and I’ve had a couple that took me out of training for several weeks.
Mountain Biking as Cross Training
Ok, if you’re a mountain bike rider then this section is not for you!
If you’re an endurance athlete like a runner, road cyclist or triathlete then this is for you. However before you start this remember that moderation is our leading light, so if you’re just starting out or are in the Preparation phase of your training plan then be sure to take it easy and just make it a little bit harder on every ride.
Riding like I’m going to outline now has two affects:
- Riding becomes much safer – a double whammy since no cars makes it safer and now we’re also going to ride safer!
- We increase the intensity of our training – really important to keep our VO2max up there
And achieving this is really pretty easy, since I have been doing this for the last couple of month, I can’t understand how come it took me this long to figure it out.
What we need to do is to simply reverse our focus when it comes to down and uphill sections of mountain bike trails. So when we arrive at a downhill section we see this as RECOVERY! That’s right we go as slow as we can, use the brakes frequently, get our breath back and once we have we enjoy the scenery as we cruise along.
However when the terrain points up we CRUSH it! Yep as soon as the uphill starts we motor, how hard only depends on the length of the climb since we want to make sure we get to the top. For short climbs go 80% for longer climbs go 60 – 70% depending on the length.
And there you have it! Simply reverse the focus between up and down and we have a fantastic cross training opportunity!
