NSMB.com Enduro Week: Day One

From January 24 to 27, NSMB.com will be featuring a series of articles focusing on Enduro racing. We start with two articles that approach the question "What is Enduro and why does it matter?"

First off, Seb's introduction to Enduro Week can be found here...

And, taking the bull by the horns, Ash Smith goes over the background of Enduro racing as a discipline...

All Enduro Week articles will be archived on THIS PAGE for future reference.

BC "enduro"

Canadian Open Enduro was amazing last year! If I can sell a kidney I will buy an AM bike suitable for the event and do it again this year, but after the two bike purchases already this year….

What a great event. For another good one closer to home (Vancouver) the SD at the North Shore Bike Fest was also amazing!

Great article for clarity. The term is thrown around quite a bit

BC "enduro"

Actually I'd call that stage racing. The whole of each stage was timed. You didn't need to climb up to the top of Garbo on your own power.

Richies Rally was a proper Enduro. We climbed to the top of each of the special stages untimed then it was pin it time for the timed DH.

http://www.richieschley.com/richies-rally.php

BC has the potential for amazing Enduro racing. Super fun events. I am looking forward to more of them.

let's hope the UCI stays away, although sounds like they've got their stupid eyes on it….fastest way to kill creative events that define 'enduro' is to let those idiots make it 'official'….in my very humble opinion…

Enduro is really just rally racing on a mountain bike to me… that's what most of us have done here forever… well with skinnys as well, so i guess it's more like "downhill trials enduro mountain biking"

let's hope the UCI stays away, although sounds like they've got their stupid eyes on it….fastest way to kill creative events that define 'enduro' is to let those idiots make it 'official'….in my very humble opinion…

Mine too. I appreciate that a governing body at the highest level is required, but to me, these guys are a bunch of road guys with no off road experience. Hence wrecking XC to make it TV friendly with multiple laps of a shorter course. They wouldn't dream of changing road races into crits or kermesses for TV's sake. And don't get me going on pits for XC.

I like the concept of this Enduro type of races. I would rather see things evened out with a course where a longer travel bike and skills evened out the climbing though. Count the uphill and make it technical up down and across.

I would rather see things evened out with a course where a longer travel bike and skills evened out the climbing though. Count the uphill…

You have to be really careful when you start timing uphill bits in Enduro. Add too much timed uphill and it very quickly becomes a test of fitness more than tech capability, which gets you back towards the same net result as Super-D IMHO.

In the European Enduros that we run on big "natural" alpine trails, we tend to find that the big descent stages have enough incidental uphill sections within them (e.g. 50m vert uphill over the course of a 500m vert downhill stage) that we actually say, yeah, that was enough leg work to even things out, no need to be adding out-and-out uphill stages.

You have to be really careful when you start timing uphill bits in Enduro. Add too much timed uphill and it very quickly becomes a test of fitness more than tech capability, which gets you back towards the same net result as Super-D IMHO.

In the European Enduros that we run on big "natural" alpine trails, we tend to find that the big descent stages have enough incidental uphill sections within them (e.g. 50m vert uphill over the course of a 500m vert downhill stage) that we actually say, yeah, that was enough leg work to even things out, no need to be adding out-and-out uphill stages.

heaven forbid a race that requires some fitness as well as technical skill

I like the concept of this Enduro type of races. I would rather see things evened out with a course where a longer travel bike and skills evened out the climbing though. Count the uphill and make it technical up down and across.

The cool thing about Enduro as it sits is the courses can vary quite a bit. Rather than a Downhill which is almost 100% gravity oriented, or XC which is majority fitness-based, or Super D which doesn't include an endurance aspect, Enduro includes elements of all of these.

While sanctioning Enduro may apply restrictions to events that want to be involved on that level, the discipline as a whole still has potential for different organizers to put their own twist on it.

I'm not really stoked on all-out XC racing, though I do like the endurance aspect of all day XC and AM rides – so the prospect of more stage-based Enduro events locally is of great interest to me.

Count the uphill and make it technical up down and across.

But thats what XC already is. I think they've got it right with untimed climbs that have a cut-off. Adjust the cut-off to make it more fitness-oriented or more skill-oriented.

Canadian Open Enduro was amazing last year! If I can sell a kidney I will buy an AM bike suitable for the event and do it again this year, but after the two bike purchases already this year….

What a great event. For another good one closer to home (Vancouver) the SD at the North Shore Bike Fest was also amazing!

I'm really interested in doing this race this year. Are the transfers to the stages difficult? As in did anyone actually miss their start time on the next stage?

heaven forbid a race that requires some fitness as well as technical skill

Get back in the box troll.

As if DH racing, with zero uphill, doesn't require fitness. Never mind something like the MegaAvalanche.