READING HARD ENDURO LINES

The Technique

1. Read the section backwards. Beginners look at the entry because the entry is what frightens them. Elite riders find the exit first and work back up to where they are standing. The exit is the constraint: if the top of a rock step feeds into a hard right against a tree, you cannot arrive there carrying speed, which means you cannot use momentum to climb the step, which means the whole thing has to be done on the clutch. Find the exit, then find the last point on the line where you have real control, then plan everything below that. If you read forwards you will build a line that gets you into the section and abandons you at the top.
2. Traction is a surface question, not a terrain question. The same granite makes and breaks riders depending on what is on it. Dry lichen is glass. Wet lichen is worse. Bare wet granite with a rough crystalline face is often better grip than dry dust over hardpack. Sandstone that has been polished by other tyres goes shiny and you can see it - a subtle sheen against the matte rock around it, usually right where every other rider has put their rear wheel. Look for the unpolished edge, the crack running across your direction of travel, the moss-free strip, the small ledge of soil packed against the uphill face of a rock. On roots, the rule that matters is angle: a root running across your path at ninety degrees is a step you can hop, a root running at thirty degrees is a rail that will steer your front wheel off the line and put you into the tree it came from. Cross roots as square as you can and if you cannot, expect the deflection and hold the bars loose enough that the bike can move under you.
3. Read gradient by looking at what grows and what has moved. Water is honest. Follow the drainage lines in a hillside and you are reading a map of where the fall line runs, because the water found it first. Loose material collects at the base of steep pitches and thins out where the pitch eases, so a wide fan of broken rock at the bottom of a climb tells you the ground above is steeper than it looks from below. Grass and leaf litter sit where slope is gentle and water is slow. Bare polished rock sits where slope is severe and water is fast. Above all, walk to the side and look across the section rather than up it. Gradient is nearly impossible to judge from directly beneath, and every rider who says the climb "looked fine from the bottom" was standing in the one place that hides it.
4. Decide where momentum is built and where it is killed, and mark those points physically. Every hard section is a sequence of two kinds of ground: ground that gives you drive and ground that only takes it away. A short run of packed soil before a ledge is a momentum bank - you spend that on the ledge. A field of loose head-sized rock is a momentum sink - it will eat everything you carry into it and give nothing back, so entering it fast just means you crash further in. Walk the line and name each metre out loud as bank or sink. Then find the single point where you most need drive, work out which bank is going to pay for it, and check that nothing between the two will steal it. If nothing pays for it, you need the clutch instead of speed, and that changes the whole approach.
5. Walk it properly or do not claim to have walked it. Walking a section means putting your boots on the exact line, not beside it. Stand on the rock you intend to put the front wheel on and feel whether it rocks under your weight. Push the loose stuff with your foot and see if it is a crust over a hole. Kneel at the ledge and look at its lip from wheel height, because a step that looks square from standing often has an undercut face that will stop the front wheel dead. Count your steps between the features so you know the section as a rhythm rather than a picture: bank, step, two metres, off-camber, tree, exit right. When you ride it you will not have time to look; you will be executing a sequence you already know. Photograph or film nothing at this stage. The camera flattens gradient and you will end up committing to a line you have only seen on a screen.
6. Have three lines, not one. The A line is the one you want. The B line is uglier, slower and almost always involves more clutch and less speed, and it exists so that when the A line fails halfway you have somewhere to go instead of stalling sideways on a hill. The C line is the way around, and identifying it is not weakness, it is the thing that lets you attempt the A line with a clear head. Riders who have not found a C line ride tight, because failure is unbounded. Riders who have found one ride loose, because the worst case is already handled and paid for.
7. Make the commit decision before you start the motor, and make it on consequence rather than difficulty. Ask three questions. If I fail at the hardest point, where does the bike end up and where do I end up? Can I recover the bike from there alone, or does it need two people and a strap I do not have? And is there anything downhill of me that turns a slide into an injury - a drop, a stump field, a tree at chest height, water. A hard move above soft ground with a clear runout is a fair bet even at low odds. An easy move above a rock shelf is a bad bet at high odds. When you are deep in remote country, on Cape York or anywhere else where the nearest help is hours of driving and then hours of flying, shift every one of those thresholds. The line you would ride at a local park with mates and a ute is not the line you ride on day four of an expedition with a broken radiator fan and one working bike between three.
8. Commit as a decision you already made. The commit itself is short and unglamorous: you have read the exit, you have banked the momentum, you know where the clutch does the work, and now you execute the rhythm you walked. The failure mode of good riders is not choosing a bad line, it is choosing a good line and then half-riding it because they are still negotiating with themselves at the entry. If you are still deciding when the front wheel touches the first rock, you have already picked the B line without meaning to. Decide at the bottom, off the bike. Then the ride is just the ride.

Common Mistakes

Reading the section from the seat, rolling up and looking at it from the bike. Fix: get off, walk to the side, and look across the fall line. Gradient and exit are invisible from the saddle and from directly below.

• Choosing the line other tyres have used. Fix: check whether those tracks belong to riders who made it or riders who got stuck. Polished rock and a churned rut are usually the record of a failure, and the clean ground half a metre left is the line.
• Treating a failed attempt as information about your ability. Fix: treat it as information about the line. Go back down, re-walk the point where it went wrong, and change one variable - entry speed, gear, or foot placement - rather than trying the same thing harder.
• Committing on difficulty instead of consequence. Fix: run the three questions on every serious section. Where does the bike land, can you get it out alone, and what is below you.

The Drill

Pick a technical section you have not ridden and give yourself ten minutes on foot before the engine starts. Write or say aloud, in order, the exit, the single hardest point, the momentum bank that pays for it, and your B and C lines. Then ride it. The standard is that your description of the section matches what actually happened - not that you cleaned it. Do this on ten sections and count how many times your read was accurate. Under seven and you are still guessing; the fix is more time on foot, not more throttle.

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