The weird and wonderful world of Downhill

Last week I entered and raced in the Australian National Championships. Yeah the XCO course was brutal, it had 350m climbing yada yada, but I am not here to tell you about the XCO course because this year I made a last minute decision to race the Downhill discipline, despite not having a downhill bike (running my 150mm Transition Sentinel) or having raced gravity in a long while, and never having raced DH.

So here are a few key points and thoughts I had over the week:

-Energy management is key for DH, just a few runs can really fatigue your whole body, and while standing around waiting for a shuttle and cruising the liaison to the top of the run is ‘easy’ do it multiple times a day and the load is pretty severe; even if it doesn’t show up as training stress. Factor in a few days of this and you have a recipe for deep fatigue right when it counts: race day. Plan your week right to be firing when it matters and remember: the fitter you are the more you can manage leading into a race without falling down the well of fatigue. The more you can manage=better knowledge of the course=faster riding.

-Related to energy management, nutrition is key but in a very different way from XCO. Due to the aerobic nature of XCO and it’s intensity, timing of nutrients can be a very important part of performance. Downhill is an explosive sport, with any pedalling likely to be neuromuscular, and whole body strength is vital. To this end, nutrition is key in staving off fatigue for whole day runs (think of that mid afternoon lull and how that change in cognition could effect your performance) as well as supporting muscle recovery. Luckily, you can just eat between runs, and because it’s self-directed practice, you can just schedule your day to fit in with nutritional requirements.

-Line choices, plans and subsequent flexibility. The course at Maydena was a great race to have my first experience of racing pure DH as opposed to gravity enduro events. The course was–at first–dry and fun. There were A lines I was planning on riding and the plan was coming together. By the end of the week, though, the course had disintegrated into a sandy off camber chute and exits from features became more precarious. All good, another plan was made. It seemed all good to go until Saturday’s seeding became a washout. Such a strange way to ride the course, unable to clip into my mud clad clipless pedals I ran much of the course like a total banana. I wasn’t alone, the girls seeding around me creating a muddy pile up. Laughs for miles. Inward screaming for the rest of the day. Thankfully, by race day Sunday it wasn’t quite as wet, and dried out even better as the day progressed.

-Nerves are just the same as other sports, but each second counts more. The beauty of XCO is once the gun goes off you’re in the process of doing a maximally paced effort for around 90minutes, and if shit goes wrong it’s not the end of the world. In DH, the gun goes off and while it’s just you vs the track, there is an acute pressure and awareness that each second counts far more, that can make the discipline dependant on riding the knife edge and pushing wherever you can. The big difference between this and XC descents, in my experience, is that you’re already cross-eyed on an XCO descent and while you’re riding it hard, you’re looking to the next section to reset, regroup and get back on the pedals after short technical descents. In DH, there is no resetting and getting back on the pedals: each slightly less steep traverse is an opportunity, if you take it, to push further and gain more speed. This was probably the biggest thing to get my head around, there was no fireroad to regroup after the technical sections and get back to mashing pedals, it was all a technical section, with pedal mashing limited to short bursts between sections.

-It still hurts. DH is still fatiguing in the race run, but nothing like XCO. Yeah sure it’s not trying to punch 5w/kg up a hill for 90mins, but it is that melting point of cognition, speed skill and neuromuscular power.

How did it go? Well, I survived and the Transition was up to the task. I am not going to be qualifying for any DH world cups anytime soon, but I was stoked to get my shit together and put together a reasonably tidy run and take out masters women overall.

I very much enjoyed sharing this week with my DH athletes, who both put down solid runs and have progressed greatly from last year. So onwards on upwards, or downwards if DH is your thing!

Here’s Bailey, showing us how it’s really done!