Noob’s Guide to MTB Racing #7: Nutrition and Hydration for Endurance Races

Fueling can absolutely make or break your day. If you run out of fuel and bonk, it can be hard to recover to keep riding for hours more. If you eat too much, or the wrong thing between laps or at an aid station, bloating and tummy aches can slow you down to a snails pace until you get through it. It’s no exaggeration to say that fueling is the second most important aspect of endurance racing behind good training and fitness. Bad food choices have taken me out of more endurance races than exhaustion, injury, crashes, mechanicals and weather, combined.

Plan to consume 200-350 calories per hour: Everybody’s body is different, but this calorie range should cover most people. The fitter you are and the deeper your glycogen reserves are, the less you will need, and your base metabolism will be a factor too. You will have to do a few long rides and races and record what you eat to figure out where you are in this range.

Create a Fueling Plan: Multiply the average number of calories you expect to consume per hour by the number of hours you will be on the bike to figure out your total calories for the day. Then look at the nutritional labels of the food items and drinks you plan to consume during the race and start adding them together until you have enough calories to get you through the event. I use a spreadsheet to calculate this. And it would be wise to record what you actually consumed after the race for future reference.

Use Sports Drink as Your Primary Fuel Source: Its easier to digest calories in liquid form. Its easiest to get liquid in your mouth from a hydration pack. As stated in Part #4, but certainly worth repeating: most sports drinks will foul your hydration bladder quickly, and you will need to clean it after each event. I find that Tailwind Endurance Fuel has a light flavor that is refreshing and its easy to clean out of hydration packs with nothing more than a rinse. They claim that its “All you need, all day. Really.” I find I can still tolerate it as a refreshing drink at 200, or no more than 250 calories per liter (they make it simple in that its 100 calories per scoop), and then I need some solid food every hour or two as well.

Keep Fueling Consistently: This is easier said than done. It’s pretty easy to get distracted by race conditions, technical trail sections or interacting with other riders, and forget to eat or drink. But these dips and calorie consumption can add up over time and you risk bonking or are forced you to eat a bit extra to compensate, and risk indigestion.

It’s hard to consume too many electrolytes while racing: It’s easy to get dehydrated while racing. It can also be easy to do the opposite and drink too much, but I personally find that getting more salt in my body is always a good think while endurance racing. That might mean salty snacks like goldfish or salted nuts (which are also a refreshing change from the sweetness of my sports drink) but it usually also means that I’m taking an electrolyte tablet eery hour or two, on top of all that.

Noob’s Guide to MTB Racing #6: Nutrition and Hydration for XC Races

What to Eat Before The Race: I’ll get more into this in Part #9: Pre-Race, to follow. For the moment note that, because of the intensity of the start of a mountain bike race, its important not to over-eat before the race. My rule of thumb is to eat a satisfying but not large breakfast finishing no less than 3 hours before the race.

Plan to drink 1 liter per hour. If its hot and you’re sweating a lot or if you’re pushing yourself harder, you will need to drink more. Some people just naturally need more water than others. Honestly, a liter is too much for most folks in most cases, but until you start to get a feel for how your body reacts to different race-day conditions, its better to have a little too much than not enough.

Drink Early, Drink Often: Again, at race pace you will need more water than you thirst might indicate, and your mind will be on many other things, so you need to remind yourself to drink regularly, right from the first few minutes of the race.

Use a Hydration Pack: Its difficult to get a bottle off the bike frequency and safely during a XC race. So use a hydration pack instead, carry only as much water as you need. With that said, on a less technical course with a lot of double-track or road, a water bottle will be lighter.

Electrolyte are really important to keeping your brain and nervous system firing correctly. For shorter events, you probably have enough reserves in your body to make it to the end, but if you’re racing more than an hour, topping up can help keep you sharp to the finish. I like electrolyte tables since they are easy to ingest independent of calorie intake but a secure place to keep them while racing takes some forethought. Some people like products that can be dissolved in your water like Nuun tablets.

Have a little fuel on-hand: Depending on your fitness level and how well you ate before the race, you may be able to make it through the whole race without eating. Then again, you might not, and bonking in the last few miles of a race can make for a rough finish. Eating while racing is difficult. An energy gel pack is just enough calories for 15-30 minutes of racing and for most folks is relatively easy to digest. Pro tip: Rather than carrying them in your jersey pocket, instead tape one or two to your bike by the rip-off tab, someplace like the top tube or stem. These can then just be ripped off with one hand and squeezed into the mouth as needed. Don’t litter.

An energy bar, granola bar, or energy chew with the package already opened will be fairly easy to eat with one hand while riding, if you’re not into gels.

How to know when to eat?: If you find yourself feeling GREAT, its probably time to eat. I usually have a surge of energy and good feelings right before I bonk. If you start feeling even a little bit tired or hungry eat immediately, do not wait until it gets worse.

Sports Drinks have water, calories and electrolytes, so why not just drink those? First off, most sports drinks will provide the nutrients for bacteria and fungi to start growing in your hydration pack. If you use sports drink in a hydration pack, you will need to carefully wash ever nook and cranny of the bladder, hose and bite valve after every use, which is a PIA. Second, sports drink is often ‘syrupy’ and not as thirst quenching as water. Third, sometimes you want a mix of water, calories, and electrolytes that is different than what is formulated in your sports drink.

One combo that might work is a hydration pack with just 1 L in it, and a small bottle of sports drink mixed at a higher than standard concentration. On of our sponsors, Scratch Labs’ drink would be ideal for this. You can drink from the bottle on the open stretches of the course when its safe to take a hand off the bars for a few seconds, to get your calories and electrolytes. It’s a little heavier than the gel pack, but you might find it easier to digest and handle.

Another option is to use sports drink diluted to about 50% of the recommended mix rate (or if you’re buying it in liquid form, mixed 1:1 with water. You’ll still need to clean out your bladder, but the trickle of calories and electrolytes you get in this mix should be enough to get you through an XC length event.

You’ll just have to try things out to see what works for you. But never eating or drinking something new on race day.

Noob’s Guide to MTB Racing #5: Cornering

You probably suck at corning. Sorry to be blunt, but even if you already race, I have to tell you, most Cat 3,4,5 cross racers are pretty terrible at cornering. I’ve literally passed half-a-dozen people in a single corner in a CX race. I’m sure they all passed me right back on the next climb on long straight-away, but the point is, they lost a lot of time because they didn’t know how to get through a corner effectively. Multiply that by every corner in the race, and multiply that by every lap. Mountain bike races have a lot more corners than a cross race, and most of them are more technically challenging. Aside from getting fitter and stronger, learning to corner faster and harder is probably the best way you can make up more time in races.

Use the whole trail: Let’s start with the basics. A single track trail might be 8” wide, it might be 2’ wide. There’s no rule you need to ride right down the middle of it. Before we get to cornering proper, you have to think of the trail, not as a single line, but as a broad swath of route options. Imagine a gently bending section of trail. Now imagine yourself riding the straightest line possible through these gentle bends. There are a lot of factors that might effect the fastest line down a particular section of trail, but the straightest line between two points is always the shortest, and its a good place to start. Now, let’s apply this concept to corners proper.

Wide-tight-wide: You want to use the whole corner so you ride the straightest, and therefore fastest line through it. That means starting wide, entering on the outside of the corner, cut tight to the very inside corner, and exit wide to the outside again.

Put your outside foot down: You’ll be leaning towards the inside of the turn so keep that inside foot/pedal up and out of the way. You should actually be pushing down through the outside foot to increase the load on the tires, and thus traction (more on this below).

Loading your tires: Pushing your bike down into the corner will give you more grip in the corners. You’re driving the bike through the trail with your downward thrust. Your outside pedal should be down and you should be pushing down through it. Typically, I load the front tire a little bit more than the rear, pushing through the corner with the front tire. You should be putting force down on the rear tires too, but the difference is that if the front tire slides out, you are going down. If your rear tire slides out, you can usually recover.

PRACTICE!: Feel out how hard you can corner. Get a baseline feel for how hard you can corner at various speeds. Find someplace that’s just packed dirt, maybe a construction site, maybe a firmed-up baseball field, a packed-gravel lot if you have to, whatever. If you can’t find a big area of dirt, lawn will suffice. The dynamics and break-away points will be different than on dirt, but what you’re trying to determine is the feel of your body and the bike before breaking traction. Now, just practice making turns. Go a bit faster and/or tighter each time, lean your bike over harder each time, incrementally, until your tires start to let loose and you skid or go down. You may want to do this without clipping in. A good tire will give you some warning before it lets loose, but its not uncommon for a tire to just let go in the corner unexpectedly. See how you, your bike and your tires handle corners so you have a feel for how hard you can push it on the trail. Now, that you know the limit, keep it going a few more times, keeping yourself just inside the breaking point for traction.

PRACTICE!: You’ve got to be smooth before you can be fast. Start out practicing cornering at a slow speed, a speed at which you can easily handle the speed and can think through what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Get the technique down, get the line down. You should feel smooth and steady. Then once you think you have it, start pushing yourself to go through the corners progressively faster. Good technique is more important than absolute speed at this point.

Now that you have a plan, find yourself a short section of trail with several corners that you can easily repeat and ‘session’ over and over. You’re going to want to ride each corner 5-10 times each in this outing. Now, here is what you’ll be practicing:

Do your breaking before the corner: The contact patch of your tires only have so much grip. That grip can be used for braking or corning, or some combination there of. If you’re using some of that traction for braking, you’re not using all of it for corning as fast as possible. Decelerate to the right speed before you hit the corner. Then hold your conviction, keep your fingers off the brakes, and rail it. 

If you must brake mid-corner, use your rear brake only. The rear tire might skid around if you over do it, but this is easier to recover from. In certain conditions a skilled rider can even use a rear wheel skid to adjust their angle on the trail and exit the corner faster.

Look through the corner to the exit: Seeing as far as you can through will help you understand how to set-up for it. Look for the line that will give you the fastest exit. Look for any anomalies that might cause you to alter this line a bit. You can’t always see all-the-way through a corner, but look as far as you can. Keep your eyes on the point you need your bike to go. Push your body and drive your handlebars to get there. 

Bermed Corners: Once you learn to handle them, a berm allows you take a corner fast. You can lean into the turn and the centrifugal force you generate becomes downforce pushing your tires into the berm, giving you better traction. So how do you make the most of it? You still want to maintain as much momentum as possible. In this case you’re going to use your momentum to build elevation up the side of the berm, and then set up your exit for the berm so that you turn that elevation back into momentum. The faster you are going the higher you should go up the side, but if you go too high you will bleed off too much speed, and of course, you are riding a longer distance and taking more time covering that distance. You should feel like you’re forcing the bike to stay down a bit more than it naturally wants to. You should reach your highest elevation on the berm at the midpoint of the turn or slightly before you reach the midpoint. Its smoother and easier to have a steady arch through the turn, but squaring the turn a bit earlier gives you a little better control and speed for your exit.

Finding berms on flat corners: Modern trails are built, to shed water off the side rather than letting it run down the length of the trail. As trails are used more, they tend to cut in, developing a shallow rut from erosion and soil compaction. As a result of this design and wear on a trail, trails will often form mini-berms in flat corners. Try to uses these little edges when you can find them to push against, hold more traction and maintain more speed through the corner.

Sometimes a berm is a distraction: Sometimes poorly made berms, are not the best line through a corner. Same goes for those wear-created mini-berms, after all, most people don’t take the best line through the corner. Don’t force yourself to use a berm if it doesn’t seem like the best line.

Pass on the inside on corners. Now that you’re smooth and fast in the corners, use this to your advantage. If you’re looking to pass the rider in front of you, watch for an opportunity when they will hit a corner wide. You will need to anticipate this, accelerate before the corner, set-up wide, come through the corner inside of them, and get by them in time to exit wide.

Noob’s Guide to MTB Racing #4: Going Fast Uphill and Downhill

Bike races are won in the climbs. For the most part, your climbing performance will depend on your strength, aerobic fitness and power to weight ratio. But there is some technique you can apply to make the best use of your abilities.

Build speed leading up to the base of a climb: The more momentum you have at the start of a climb, the further up the climb it can carry you. If you’re going from a descent directly into a climb carry as much speed through from the downhill to the uphill.  If you’re going from a flat into a climb, start your effort early to build some speed going into it. Either way your momentum will carry you further up the climb with less effort.

Stay seated for most of the climb: You are more efficient sitting down. You can produce more power standing, but at the expense of using significantly more energy, and requiring more oxygen. Keep your butt in the saddle and stand if necessary, just at the tail-end of the climb to get yourself over the top.

It’s OK to stand for short climbs: Putting a bit more effort into short climbs is worth it if it allows you to maintain momentum.

Keep up the effort you are putting into climbing over the top of a climb and down the back side. This allows you to get yourself back up to speed and cover ground faster. Climbing is hard, usually you will feel like letting off the gas as soon as you’re at the top, but then you’re stuck at the top putzing along slowly, and losing time. Pace yourself so as to keep the effort going for just a few more seconds. Build up your speed on the flat or descent that follows, then you can take it down a notch. This is a good way to pass people who blow-up on the climbs too.

For steep climbs, move your body weight forward. Doing so will keep the front wheel down, maintain traction and put you in a powerful pedaling position. For the steepest climbs, you’ll want to bend your elbows, move your chest down towards your bars and your butt forward and plant your taint on the tip of the saddle. It’s not comfortable, but your legs and lungs will hurt so much, you’ll hardly notice.

For steep or technical descents, you’ll want to get your body weight back and down. Your butt should be hanging behind and below the saddle, your inner/upper thighs should be in contact with the saddle for control, and you should be hovering about an inch above it. Keep your cranks parallel to the ground, keep your knees and elbows bent and ready to react. Keep your weight off the front wheel.

Don’t be afraid of speed: Speed alone is not dangerous. In fact, speed can make traveling over that rough section you find intimidating smoother and easier. Carry as much speed as you can into the next section.

PRACTICE!: Try pacing yourself up and over climbs on your trail rides. Find the steepest climbs you can and challenge yourself to get up them, and then to get up them fast. And you don’t need to be out on the trail to practice a lot of these techniques. You can work on a lot of this on the road bike, or find a local park with rolling terrain.