One of the most effective ways to improve your cornering is to have the correct amount of speed going into the turn. If you’re going slow, you’ll probably make it, but if you have to slow down that much every time you want to make a turn you won’t enjoy riding your mountain bike very much. You see, most mountain bike trails are curvy since trees in the wild don’t grow in rows. If you’re racing at a Christmas tree farm though, there might not be any turns since the trees do grow in rows, so for that ride you can ignore this post.

A more common problem though is having too much speed going into a turn. Overshooting the turn (continuing straight off the trail instead of turning) can be really painful (remember those cliffside trails?). Another problem is sliding out in the turn. This usually has less dire consequences than overshooting the turn but dirt rash is painful and I’d recommend against it. Leaning the bike and dropping your outside pedal (as I mentioned in the previous cornering post) helps, but if you’re going too fast you’ll still slide out.

Okay, you now understand the severity of going into a turn with too much speed. Right? So what do you do? Use your brakes of course! Now don’t worry, I didn’t write this entire post to tell you to “use your brakes” so you don’t have too much speed going into a turn. That would be a waste of my time and of yours. The key is when to use your brakes. The obvious answer is “when you realize you’re going too fast.” Unfortunately, this tends to happen about half-way through the turn. And if you hit your brakes at that point you break the friction of your tires with the ground and increase the chance that you will slide out and crash. So instead you should use your brakes before the turn so you go into the turn with the perfect amount of speed. What is the perfect amount of speed? Well, you want enough speed to be able to flow through the turn but not so much that you slide out or overshoot the turn. I can’t give you an exact number because it depends on how sharp the turn is, what the trail conditions are, what kind of tires you are using, whether or not it is banked, whether there are obstacles in the turn, how much you lean the bike, how much you and the bike weigh and a bunch of other things. Basically, it all boils down to physics and friction and things like that.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), our brains can’t logically take in all of those variables and calculate the correct speed. Instead, like most of bike riding, we have to do it by “feel”. And the best way to get a “feel” for the speed you should carry into a turn is by riding. So go find a trail with a lot of turns and practice. Choose a turn that is hard for you and ride it a few times. Try riding it faster and faster until you hit a point where you can tell that if you rode it any faster you would slide out. Then find another turn and do it again!

My fingers are on the brakes, but I'm not braking (I hope)

Instead, I’m going to give an overview of the week in numbers and pictures.

Miles ridden: 195
Hours ridden: 20.3
Feet climbed: 24,787
Snakes: 1
Lizards: At least 25
Times I rode Porcupine Rim: 2
Flat tires: 0
Brand new tires I completely wore out: 2
Nights I ate pasta for dinner: All of them (5)
Sandwiches eaten during rides: 4
Avocados consumed: 5
Times I said “Okee dokee”: 50
Times Adam and Pua repeated me after I said “Okee dokee”: 50
Illegal trails ridden (by accident, nonetheless): 1
Days I rode trails that I’d never ridden before: 5
Probability that I’ll return to Moab: 100%

Got me some weird tans - like this glove tan

We almost rode The Whole Enchilada (no Burro Pass)

Pua thought I was crazy, but I like sandwiches as a mid-ride snack

Putting the Occam through its paces

Group shot on the edge of Castle Valley

Pot hole Arch with Pua

Watching some crazy off-roading

Tubeless rocks! Especially tubeless with sealant. Not only does it get rid of annoying flats like goat heads, glass, and small rocks, but it allows you to run lower tire pressures without risking pinch flats. Personally, I run WTB TCS (Tubeless Compatible System) tires (26 PSI front, 28 PSI rear), but as long as you’re using sealant, you can run most tube tires tubeless if you have tubeless-compatible wheels.

My one issue with tubeless used to be installing the tires. I always had to find a gas station or bike shop with a high-pressure air compressor. But at the Sea Otter Classic in 2009, Joe, the Giant team mechanic, taught me a trick to install tube tires on tubeless rims with sealant and a floor pump. Since then, I’ve almost always installed my tires with a pump instead of an air compressor and it works like a charm!

Things you’ll need:

• Tubeless wheel – In the video I used Crank Brothers Cobalt wheels. I now use Stan’s Notubes wheels and they are even easier to install with a floor pump!
• Tire – In the video I used a WTB Nano Raptor. I still use (and love) these tires.
• Stan’s Notubes tire sealant – It’s the best.
• Floor pump – Genuine Innovations Top Dog Legend floor pump. Still use it. Still love it!
• Tire levers

Here is a video of how to install the tire (and as it has had almost 40,000 views, I like to think it’s rather informative…). If you don’t like videos or prefer step-by-step instructions, keep scrolling.

1. Clean your wheel.
   
2. Install one side of the tire.
   
3. Shake the tire sealant. (It helps if you dance).
   
4. Pour in the sealant. Refer to bottle for correct amount.
   
5. Finish installing your tire.
   
6. Using your tire lever, seat the tire 2/3 – 3/4 of the way around, or until it becomes VERY difficult to move the lever. Note: for some wheel/tire combinations, my Notubes/Nanos for example, you will not make it 2/3 of the way around. That’s okay. The most important thing is that the tire is seated on both sides of the valve and is tight.
   
7. Remove the tire lever by pushing on the opposite side of the tire to keep the tire from un-seating.
   
8. Seat the other side of the tire as far around as you can without knocking the first side off.
   
9. Remove the tire lever. DO NOT push from the other side or you will unseat the side you already did, instead, push from the center CAREFULLY.
   
10. Check both sides of the tire to make sure that it is seated as much as possible. The tire should be VERY close to the rim wall on both sides and should NOT have fallen into the rim well and it should be tight.
    
11. Connect a floor pump. I recommend the Genuine Innovations Top Dog Legend because it is a high-volume, metal pump. Cheap plastics ones don’t work nearly as well…
    
12. Pump up your tire. Most likely you will hear some air escaping. If so, pump faster! Eventually, you should hear some pinging noises. This is your tire seating and is a good sign! I do not recommend inflating the tire higher than 40 or 45 PSI. It can blow off the rim. This is scary and not fun at all! If you hit 45 PSI without the tire seating, let some air out, massage the places that haven’t seated (roll the tire up and out towards the rim) and pump it up again. After a time or two, it should seat.
    
13. Check both sides of your tire to confirm that the bead shows evenly. This tells you that you tire has seated properly. If it has not, refer to the previous step.
    

I want you to imagine hero dirt. That dirt that makes you feel like a superhero because it is so tacky you can take corners at full speed but rolls so fast it could be pavement. Now I want you to double the stickiness. Got it? Now multiply that by a stickiness factor of 100. That’s what we raced on. One racer called it “velcro dirt” and another mentioned that it “felt like riding on the sticky side of duct tape.” I call it glue dirt.

The good part of glue dirt is that it grips really well in corners. Once I realized this, I started taking the corners at full speed. And yes, it made me feel like a superhero. The not so good part is that it grips really well on flats too. So well, in fact, that it wears you out. Had I been training on sticky-side-up-duct-tape-covered-trails I might have been prepared for this. But the trails in Taos are currently dry and hard-packed and I was used to going pretty fast on flat straightaways. So on the flats I did not feel like a superhero.

The glue dirt didn’t appear until the second of four laps. Lap one was actually a bit slippery. But since the amateurs started 10 minutes behind the Pros, by lap two 160 racers had converted the slippery mud into glue dirt. What surprised me the most though was that when I had pre-ridden the course in the rain the evening before, the mud made it unridable. I had been able to ride for approximately 15 minutes and then my bike got so gummed up with the clayey mud that I had to walk for over an hour to get back out.

It was a bit muddy on the pre-ride

Overall, a great race! It was fun to race in New Mexico again and I learned never, ever to ride those trails when it’s raining.

Cool, handmade trophy!

The real question is, what does this mean? Since I have yet to find a bike that has feelings (at least one that can express them) I think of this quote as: “A clean bike [makes for] a happy bike [rider].” This makes more sense and, it turns out, is true!

First and foremost, it looks good. At least at the beginning of a ride. If your bike is dirty at the end of a ride, that’s okay. But it doesn’t look good to show up at the start of a ride with a dirty bike. And if your bike looks good, you feel better (and faster). And if you feel better (and faster) you ride better (and faster). Seriously. This has been scientifically proven (okay, maybe not).

A clean bike also works better. A dirty drivetrain (chainrings, cassette, derailleur and chain) is less efficient than a clean one. I’ve heard estimates ranging from 15% to 90%, but as eHow.com isn’t necessarily the most reliable of sources, I’ll stick to 15%.

This is BAD!

My 1 hr ride

Here’s a quick rundown of how:

1. Put your bike in a stand if you have one (the Feedback Sports Pro-Elite stand is killer)
2. Pull both wheels off
3. Hose it down
4. Soap it up (I like ProGold’s Degreaser but dish soap works just fine)
5. Scrub your chain (I use the Park Tool Chain Scrubber but any solid brush works)
6. Rinse it off
7. Dry it off with a rag (or air compressor)
8. Lube your chain (with Squirt Lube – yes, that is your only option)

So why would you want to drop something? Here are a few reasons:

• It’s faster
• You don’t have to stop and walk around it
• Your riding partners won’t make fun of you
• You can tell your friends that you “dropped this massive rock!”
• Everlasting fame and glory

Convinced? Good! Turns out it’s pretty easy to “do” a drop. All you do is aim towards the drop and pedal. But, before you try this, let me mention that this is pretty useless (and doesn’t get you everlasting fame and glory) unless you land it. Landing, unfortunately, is the hard part.

To “do” AND LAND a drop:

1. Know your line. That may mean stopping and checking out the drop (and landing) the first time you ride it. That’s okay. Better to do that than to drop onto a really pointy rock.
2. Come off the drop with a bit of speed. This keeps your front tire up and helps your tires hit the ground at the same time. Which is what you want.
3. As you reach the edge of the drop, pull back on your handlebars. This also keeps your front tire up.
4. Shift your weight back. For the same reason as numbers 2 and 3.
5. Don’t close your eyes. It doesn’t help. Promise.

As you may have noticed, there is quite a bit of focus on getting your tires to hit the ground at the same time. It’s also okay if your back tire hits just before the front one. If your front tire hits first, you might still pull off the landing, but it significantly decreases your chances (proportionally to how much before the front tire hits).

To practice this, I recommend starting off with a 6-inch drop. That way if your front tire dives you probably won’t crash. Once both tires are hitting the ground at the same time, try a bigger drop. And then a bigger one. Next thing you know you’ll be heading out to Whistler to drop some 10-foot bridges. Just remember that the bigger the drop, the longer your front wheel has to stay in the air so you’ll need more speed and need to pull up harder on the handlebars.

Dropping a rock in Moab

My friend, Derek Bissett, dropping a bigger drop

When my teammate, Bryan Fawley, came flying by me a quarter of a mile after the start yelling “Get on my wheel!” I was pretty confused. First of all, I thought he wasn’t going to race because I hadn’t seem him as I was warming up. Turns out he made it to the start 45 seconds before the gun went off and decided that he might as well have some fun. Fortunately, confusion didn’t keep me from following him and he pulled me up to the front of the pack. That made two times that Bryan and I had been leading the race in one weekend! But this time we led the race for the first couple of miles (all pavement) and looked really fast and awesome for the lead truck full of photographers that we were following. Sadly, only one photo of this seems to have made it onto the interwebs…

After a couple of miles though, I decided I probably shouldn’t kill myself before the race really started and backed off a bit to save some energy for the next 45 miles of racing. On the initial climb I was with a strong group and we made good time until the first descent when we got stuck behind a racer who couldn’t descend. I really wanted to take advantage of the Occam‘s descending capabilities and drop some people, but it wasn’t meant to be, at least not on that descent. After another climb up to the entrance of Skull Valley I found myself in a group of five and as we dropped into Skull Valley we started chasing down the racers in front of us. We caught a couple on the descent but after the turn-around the group disintegrated on the 12-mile climb out. One racer left me on the climb but I gave a push right before the entrance to the singletrack and got ahead of a couple of other racers and moved into 15th.

Finishing on a flat tire

So, even though I had some lousy luck, I had a great race. I was good about staying fueled (HEED, Hammer Gel, Endurolytes and Perpetuem Solids), rode consistently the whole race and finished feeling strong and fast (and a little squirly on my flat tire).

The Whiskey 50 course - 46.7 miles with 6,642 ft of climbing

Fat Tire Crits (short, fast, paved races on mountain bikes) are done all wrong. What’s the point of racing them on mountain bikes? They would probably be more exciting if everyone raced road bikes (like normal crits) because they would go faster. So here’s what needs to happen to Fat Tire Crits: stair drops, stair climbs and curbs. The stair drops would burst any slicks (slick tires for mountain bikes) and force everyone to ride fat tires (as the name says they should). The stair climbs would also require real mountain bike tires and would be awesome to watch. And the curbs are like putting 6-inch logs in the course. Think about the spectating possibilities!

Feel the burn!

I had a decent start though and was able to get around the first turn before the bottleneck. I immediately sprinted up the right side of the pack into second place behind my teammate Bryan Fawley. It was a great feeling to be at the front of the race but I realized that if I didn’t back off I’d be in trouble. So I backed off a bit to save energy for the last couple of laps and moved into the low 20s. With two laps to go, I kicked back into gear and was able to move back into the top 20. I caught and passed quite a few people on the hill (this was especially satisfying when they were on hardtail 29ers with slicks) and finished exhausted but happy feeling like all the training I’d been doing under my new coach, Adam (of Carmichael Training Systems), was paying off.