I know it’s totally lame to post without photos when you’re trying to share a cool experience but bear with me. I feel bad enough for not taking a single photo and I don’t need to be reminded that most people visit our blog only look to at the pictures.
Last Wednesday I met up with three of the professional downhill riders that Trek sponsors. They were in New York doing a few US national downhill events as well as doing a tire test with Trek engineers. It’s my job to know what’s up with the equipment Trek’s sponsored athletes ride so I took the opportunity to pay the riders a visit.
I wasn’t able to get to the tire test in time but I did manage to meet up with the riders when they first arrived at a race venue and were doing their course inspection. The pros take the time to walk the course top to bottom and do a pretty thorough job of looking at every rock, root, turn, jump and anything else that they will be riding down when its time for practice, qualifying and racing. It was good to walk with them and observe their thought process and watch their eyes as they mapped out possible lines and problem spots. It was similar to what Joe and I do when we walk or bike a lap at a hare scramble but the DH riders are far more particular with line choice. They quickly identified sections of the course that would be critical to get right and they spent several minutes walking up and down those sections thinking about how much speed they would need to carry and where the lines would develop and deteriorate and exactly where to put their tires while riding. It was cool to see them go through the motions like that.
The bigger personal experience I had was riding a Trek Session downhill bike while I was there. The race was held at Diablo Mountain in Vernon, NJ. Diablo has a developed trail system that offers up diverse trails all serviced by a chairlift. It’s just like skiing where you buy a lift ticket, jump on the lift and get yourself back to the bottom of the hill somehow.
It was my maiden voyage on this Session so it took a few runs to get it sorted out. The fork had come from Trek’s west coast test group and was set up for someone else. And the fork tube height has a huge range of adjustment but no ideal starting point that I was aware of. The rear shock needed the sag set and rebound messed with. After each run I’d make small adjustments until the bike felt more and more comfortable. Then I stopped tuning and tried to get my head around the DH experience.
Big DH bikes are just like motos yet radically different at the same time. They’re similar in that there are lots of adjustments that can be made and you have to trust that the suspension can do a ton of work for you (as long as you’ve taken the time to get it set up correctly). To get the most out of a DH bike you have to stand on it like a moto: be aggressive, look up, react quickly, pay attention and recognize that the consequences of falling will be dire.
But DH bikes are dissimilar, too. There’s no throttle to get you up and over something or out of trouble. You have to carry speed everywhere – not only to get over stuff but just to stay upright. And because there’s no propulsion when you aren’t pedaling, staying balanced on the bike is key. If you lose your balance you have to make corrections that totally kill your momentum. The mass and mass’ location are also very different. The rider is the majority of the mass on a bike, the bike is the mass on a moto. Because of this the geometry on a DH bike is super relaxed to help keep your center of gravity in the right place. The relaxed geometry has a massive affect on how the bike handles, especially at slow speeds where the bike becomes sluggish and heavy feeling.
Anyhow, once I got the suspension and geometry settings where I could comfortably ride them, I set out to explore the mountain. There were trails with 20 feet table top jumps that you could sail through a perfect ramp to ramp arc if you hit it just so. There were steep trails littered with bowling ball-sized rocks that forced you to hang off the back of the bike and try like mad to keep up your speed and not let the front wheel fall into any gaps. A few trails had skinny, manmade trellis bridges to ride across. If you lost your nerve in the middle of a few of those you’d fall 10 feet to a garden of rocks. Pretty sketchy but I signed the release and knew what I was getting into.
I did 11, ten minute runs before my rear brake crapped out and I had to call it quits. Air in the line didn’t make it out when I set the bike up, evidently. I was pretty beat afterwards but I could have done a few more runs. A Session weighs 38 lbs so it’s not easy to horse around for hours on end.
Again, I wish I had taken time to snap some photos, but I didn’t. Next time!
