How to Anticipate Mountain Biking Breaking

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: When you're riding downhill, there's two types of braking. There's breaking to slow down and there's braking to change direction. Braking to slow down you want to happen, where you have nice, smooth ground. You don't want to do it on wet rocks like we have plenty of today. You don't want to it on loose rocks. But, some nice good dirt like this right here is a great place to bleed a little speed. So you're looking ahead, anticipating like, if you look down the trail, you see there's a bunch of loose rocks and all sorts of stuff ahead of me. So, I don't really want to get on the brakes hard there, unless it's just a little tap on the brakes to brake the bike loose and make it change direction. So coming up in through this section, I've got a couple good places to slow down and sort of a corollary to braking is hitting stuff intentionally to slow down. So some of these big square rocks, I could run into those to try to soak up some speed. But for the most part, I don't wan t to brake where it's technical. I don't want to break when I'm turning. I don't want to break where its slippery, because you only have a certain amount of traction. A finite amount of traction, like a traction to circle. Accelerating, decelerating, left, right basically. And if you're turning left real hard and you're on the brakes, boom--your vector's gone, you fall off your bike. So, as I ride through here, you'll notice where I'm getting on the brakes. You'll be able to notice that I'm braking as probably--these brakes are squeaky today, so you might hear some squeaking. And then also, you'll notice that my wheel stops spinning a little bit. So, if you focus on my wheels as I'm riding through here, you might be able to get an idea that I'm integrating all this stuff looking the riding light and just braking, anticipating what's coming ahead. So, my brake turns squeaking, that's actually for the first time, I'm angry about that, but I took a more sequitous line this way to try to get some braking in. I got my braking done in the straight line. When I got off my brakes, I observed that my bike felt so much lighter, more lively and I can make that big sharp left hand turn to get back on line. So smooth dirt, straight line, get off the brakes and then turn."