THE TRACK WALK: READING A RACE COURSE ON FOOT

The Technique

1. Walk it twice, in two directions. Your first pass goes up the hill, finish to start, and it is the one most riders skip. Climbing the track puts you facing the exit of every feature before you see its entry, which is the order the clock cares about. You see rut depth in profile instead of from above, you see which side of a root the dirt has been pushed to, and you see the light falling on the section rather than into your eyes. Your second pass goes down, in race direction, at walking pace, and that is where the plan gets made. Two passes is the minimum, and the second one has to be slow enough that you stop and crouch.
2. Read the surface, not the shape. Anyone can see where the track goes. What decides the run is what sits under the tyre, so get low and touch it. Kick a heel into the loose layer to find how deep it is and what is beneath it, because loam over hardpack behaves nothing like loam over more loam. Note where roots run with your direction of travel and where they cross it, since one is a rail and the other is a trap. Find where water sits after rain and where the track sheds it, because those two places will be the wettest and the dustiest parts of the same course by afternoon. Press a palm into the face of every berm to learn whether it is built dirt or cut hillside; built dirt moves, cut hillside does not.
3. Set braking markers that survive the whole day. A braking marker is an object, not a feeling, and it has to be visible at speed, unique within twenty metres of itself, and still standing at four in the afternoon. Course tape moves, marshals move, and "the third tree on the left" fails the moment you are in the air and cannot count. Use the specific thing: the scarred trunk, the rock with the pale face, the exact point the dirt changes colour. Set it at the height your eyes sit at on the bike rather than standing, because the two views are not the same. Then define it as a limit and not a target - your rule is brake by here, so that arriving late still leaves you a decision instead of a panic.
4. Draw every line backwards from its exit. Stand at the exit of a section and look back up the hill. The line that matters is the one that leaves you pointed straight at whatever comes next with the bike settled and your hands off the brakes. Fix that exit first, then work upwards to find the entry that delivers it. Riders who build lines forwards arrive at the exit rotated, wide and still slowing. While you are down there, find the gate the track actually gives you: the narrowest point in the section, the one place your wheels genuinely have to be. Everything either side of that gate is negotiable, and knowing which part is fixed stops you rehearsing choices that do not exist.
5. Predict the track you will get, not the one you are standing on. A course degrades in patterns you can read on foot. Braking bumps form where the ground is soft and the approach is straight, and they grow up the hill away from the corner rather than down into it. Ruts cut deepest on the inside of turns and in any clay that has held water. Loam gets scraped back to hardpack fastest where the track is fast and off camber. Freshly cut sections change more in one day than anything built years ago. Then factor your seed: if you run late in a downhill field, the track you race is not the track you practised, and if there is weather about the difference is bigger again.
6. Rank the sections by what they are worth. Not all track deserves the same attention. Time collects in two places: long fast sections where a small speed advantage compounds over every metre, and the entries into those sections, because whatever speed you start with is the speed you keep. A slow technical rock garden feels like the hardest part of the course and is usually worth less than the flat pedally exit below it. So walk the course labelling each section either time to be won or time to be lost. You attack the first kind and you defend the second. Most riders spend all of practice on the scary bit and give the race away in the open ground underneath it.
7. Memorise in chunks, then rehearse against a watch. Break the course into named sections and use ugly, specific names you will never confuse: wet root step, off camber into the fireroad, the double before the bridge. Aim for a handful of them, not thirty. Then test the memory the hard way by reciting the sequence backwards, and again starting from the middle. If you can only run it forwards from the gate you have memorised a story, not a track. Finish by sitting down, closing your eyes and riding the whole course in your head with a watch running. When your mental run and your real run land close together, you are visualising at race speed instead of daydreaming.
8. Leave the hill with a written plan and a set of decision rules. Write it while it is fresh, section by section: the primary line, the braking marker, one thing to do rather than five, and a bail line. Then add the conditionals, because that is what separates a plan from a wish. If the inside rut is deeper than the crank, go high. If it is still wet at my run time, straight over the roots and no rut. If the berm has a hole in it, brake earlier and take the flat line inside. You want to arrive in the start gate having already made every decision, so the run becomes execution and nothing else.

Common Mistakes

Walking in a group and quietly inheriting a faster rider's lines. Fix: do your second lap alone and pick lines against your own height, bike and strengths.

• Taking braking markers off tape, marshals or a bike leaning on a tree. Fix: fixed objects only - trunks, rocks, and changes in the dirt itself.
• Walking once in the morning and never going back after the field has been through. Fix: re-walk the two or three sections you rated decisive once the track has been ridden in.
• Memorising the course as one continuous story. Fix: named chunks you can recall out of order, so a mistake in one does not wipe the next.

The Drill

The blind recital. After your walk, sit somewhere you cannot see the track, start a watch and ride the course in your head, saying each section name aloud as you reach it. Standard: every section named in order with no gaps, finishing within a few seconds of your actual practice run time, and then the same list recited backwards without hesitation.

← Full mountain bike curriculum