Kreef said:
Hi Niel
Something that I have been wondering about is, how did you know that your preperation was actually preparing you for the race? What I mean is... did you train with guys who had previously done the race, or were you just training in any way, shape or form that you could and hoping that it would be applicable to the actual conditions that you would face?
You spend alot of time training on the MX course. I am assuming this was mostly for fitness. Then you also spend alot of time riding sand and doing hill climbs, but from your preperations thread, it does not seem that you did alot of extremely fast gravel road racing. (or maybe I just missed it)
What conditions did you face in the rally and were they what you expected? (aka, high speed sandy path and substandard gravel roads)
PS, again: Awesome effort man!!!
Hey there Kreef,
I had no prior contact with anyone who had done the race before. As you may know most rallies including the Dakar have quite a lot of bad dirt roads to deal with, but also with a lot off-road, hard, technical stuff thrown in to wear you out. So when you talk about what is applicable I suppose any dirt road riding will be applicable. But you should also know its more than that, because trust me after 400km of hard riding you don't want to be worrying about your skills getting over a pile of boulders, or up a 0.8m step up or something like that. So when you train for an event like you you HAVE TO focus on the technical stuff more than just blasting along a road. Building skills and confidence is critical to finishing.
My training was to build fitness, stamina and technique. The dune riding I thought would only really be applicable towards stamina and some riding skill turned out to be indispensable because there turned out to be a lot of really difficult sand riding between trees. A switch in my mind said "Okay this is just sand, not dunes". So there was nothing to be concerned about at all riding through this stuff, except keeping my pace up.
On my training routes I made sure I got some high-speed dirt road riding in as well, but practicing high speed dirt also means high risk of injury before the rally so you need to bear this in mind too and be more conservative than you would normally be. I don't mean ride slow, but its all relative. In the first three months of the six months of training I put a lot of really high speed stuff in. After that I started riding super fast a less and focussed more on technique and stamina. So I found the most difficult routes I could find and thrashed them until I could ride for 8-10 hours/day and still go out for dinner with the wife afterwards and have a normal conversation! ;D So towrds the end, the only high speed training I really got was around about an hour every session, you know, on the roads connecting to the technical stuff.
I know it was quite different to what we got in the rally, but you have to ask yourself how many times do you need to practice a powerslide or braking to tap off on the speed before a corner?
The MX training was my last bit of training that I did. By then I was so nervous of breaking something, that I stuck strictly to the MX track, where there was even less chance of me meeting a car coming the other way on a road or hurting something coming off a dune crest. But it turned out this that was probably the most applicable training I could get at the end of the day, because it wasnt so much the fast stuff that I found hard, it was all of those super sharp corners. I did not realise how tight a rally can be. I thought it was all fast, flowing stuff, but what you never see much of on camera on the Dakar or on Sertoes is the amount of really tight, sharp turning one really has to do. Also dont forget that the slow, technical stuff is also generally not very photogenic, so you dont get to see that. Even on the Dakar, you dont get to see the guys wrestling with their bikes in gullies that much because it's not easy to get to and the views are often restricted.
Training on an MX circuit helps big time with tight corners, and 2-4 hours on a circuit one is like riding 15 hours anywhere else, believe me.
The only thing I would have done differently with my training is maybe spent more time practicing ultra sharp turns, i.e. U-turning on a single track, or similar.
In conclusion then, I was pleasantly surprised that the riding was generally easier than my training and although I did not expect as much fast stuff, the technical training I got gave me the confidence to jump bridges at 140km/hr! Where I lost time was on the tight corners and more technical stuff. So I need to spend even more time practicing that. Comparing myself to the other riders in our group, I was the fastest of the three of us generally, being much faster on the open bits; but possibly the slowest on the technical stuff. So that says something - That I need more time riding enduros and in the desert, and more time in particular riding ultratight stuff.
