DIRT BIKE · Hard Enduro

ENDURANCE AND PACING FOR EXTREME ENDURO

13 min · Full library · written from fifteen years in the terrain

The point

After this lesson you can hold a workable pace across a long technical day, manage grip strength and arm pump while riding rather than only after, feed and drink without stopping the ride, and keep making sound decisions in the last hours when most riders stop making them.

Half the answer, free

The Technique

  1. Understand what is actually running out, because it is not cardiovascular fitness. Riders arrive at hard enduro from other sports assuming their engine is the limit and discover the limit is in their forearms, their grip, and their decision-making. Technical enduro is a long series of near-maximal isometric efforts - gripping, holding a bike upright, lifting, stabilising - separated by short recoveries that are usually too short. The forearm is a small muscle group doing work far above its comfortable sustained output, and once it is gone it does not come back with rest alone during the day. So pacing in this sport is mostly the management of a very small, very depletable resource, and everything below follows from that.
  2. Set your pace by your recovery, not by your speed. The practical rule across a long day is that you should be able to hold a conversation within a minute of finishing a hard section. If you finish a climb and need three minutes with your hands on your knees before you can speak, you are riding above your sustainable pace and you are borrowing from later in the day at a bad rate. Most riders overpace in the first two hours because the terrain feels manageable and the group is fresh, and then spend hours four through eight as a passenger. Ride the first hour deliberately below what you are capable of. On a long day the rider who finishes strong is almost always the one who looked slow at the start.
  3. Manage grip in real time rather than treating arm pump as a condition you either have or do not. The grip is what fails first, and the reason is that most riders hold the bars far harder than they need to, continuously, rather than hard when required and loose the rest of the time. Actively release your grip on every fire road, every downhill, every flat metre. Ride open sections with three fingers or an open palm behind the levers. Shake one hand out at a time, hanging it down below the bar so blood can return, and do this on the move rather than at stops. Trap-squeezing your shoulders and clenching your jaw feed straight into forearm tension, so drop your shoulders and unclench your jaw as a conscious check every few minutes. The elbows-up, loose-arms position is not just a technique choice; it is a fatigue management choice.
Still under the glass
  • Catching arm pump early, the setup that buys you hours, and the three-attempt rule on a hill
  • 7 more technique steps
  • The 5 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
  • The drill that builds the reflex
  • The safety non-negotiables

It opens when you book a trip that runs dirt bike - these are the exact drills you run with your coach out there. Your booking unlocks this whole library.

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Read this before you send

These sports kill people. Not rarely, and not only the reckless - every season they kill riders who were experienced, fit, well equipped and doing everything properly. That is the honest starting position and everything else we do sits on top of it.

The mountain does not know who you are. Snow releases on people with twenty years in it. Machines roll on riders who have done that line a hundred times. Water, rock, trees and other people are indifferent to how good you have become. Every time you go out you are accepting a real chance that it goes wrong, and no amount of skill removes that chance - it only changes the odds.

What that looks like in these disciplines, plainly: avalanche burial and asphyxiation, being crushed under a machine, head and spinal injuries from falls and impacts, drowning, hypothermia, and collisions with trees, rocks and other riders.

We work in remote country, so distance is part of it. A serious injury usually means hours before a helicopter can reach you, and weather sometimes means no helicopter at all. Help being close is not a feature of any trip we run.

This is exactly why we prepare the way we do. Training before you ride, gear standards, minimum party sizes, people who know the ground, and a willingness to call a day off. All of it is about improving your odds and making the group capable of looking after itself. None of it makes anything safe, none of it makes anyone competent, and passing our training is not a qualification. Anybody who tells you they can make this safe is selling something.

Everyone out there is relying on everyone else having been honest about what they can actually do. If reading this has made you hesitate, that is worth listening to rather than talking yourself out of.

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