I will post some national series overall results here to give you a picture how tuff team we are!
Oskar won M-16 series in national DH series
Lauri took 2nd in national DH series
Tuukka got 3rd in national DH series
Results: http://mountainbike.fi/vauhtijaosto/cup-pisteet
Oskar also won the overall of finnish enduro series WITH downhill bike! Results: http://www.mtb-enduro.net/tulokset
This cool team clip from Riku Länsiö has been out for a while now but i haven't shared it. Check it out and visit Sappee!
Finnish champs was held at Rovaniemi, a town at arctic circle.
Oskar took gold in m-16, Lauri took silver in m-14 and Tuukka got third in m-14.
I punctured my front tire on final run and wasn't able to go for a medal.
Results:
http://mountainbike.fi/vauhtijaosto/tulokset/2014/suomicup/Rovaniemi_DHSM2014_TULOKSET.pdf
Today we were learning how to pedal. We had Sakari Lehtinen with us to give some pointers as he has plenty of experience about efficient pedalling.Sakari is one of the best cross country riders in Finland and always specific about technique.
Efficient pedalling isn't as simple as you would think on a downhill bike. Difference might not be obvious on short tracks as you are able to lay all the power down all the way down but when you go to longer tracks it becomes more and more important.
Let's begin from bodyposition. If speed is high, low bodyposition becomes more important. You might not be able to keep it low all the way down as it might cause more fatique, especially if your strength isn't good. The most important thing is to keep your back straight same time you try to keep it as horizontal as possible.
THIS is why you have to have good mobility! If the back of your legs are tight (you are not able to reach your toes with straight legs) you are not able to stay low with your back straight. This causes worse aerodynamic position, loss of power and not as efficient breathing!
Second thing is to keep your bike straight. If the prints of your tires are going from left to right, you are loosing power and creating more friction! Try to keep your wheels heading straight to where you want to go.
Also, you don't want to lean your bike from left to right, try to keep your bike as vertical as you can. This requires good coordination and bodycontrol.
Third thing is to keep your body vertically steady. You don't want to bounce up and down as you will be compressing suspension constantly. You will be spending your energy to useless movement that is not going to push you forward. This requires strength as well as bodycontrol, especially in your legs.
Fourth thing is important specifically in downhill. You want to keep you heel down.
This means you don't want to let your toes point downwards. In any point of spin. This is safer and efficient way to pedal. When i say safer i mean that any rock won't catch your toes and bend them under you pedal. Is not nice.
This is something especially clipless riders do.
When riding long track where you have to save your energy it might be useful to focus on acceleration points. You want to accelerate as quick as possible, just after the turn, when heading to long straight. Faster you accelerate the longer time you will be travelling with high speed (= takes less time). When you reach the "top speed" you want to only maintain it. This is important. You want to maintain the speed, not to accelerate. Acceleration takes more energy than keeping speed up. You don't want to accelerate the whole straight easily and "save energy" because you will not. Sharp acceleration and then maintain the speed.
Remeber to pedal to go as fast forward as you can, not to pedal just to pedal as hard as you can!
First round of nationals is now behind and it was incredibly tight again. On a 40 second track there wasn't room for mistakes. Tuukka got third place on men 12 years old after tuff qualification run with two crashes. Lauri won men 14 years old with impressive time. Oskar still struggling with his leg injury but managed to get good second place finish. I was 5th.
Now it's time to me to travel Croatia for Buzet dh race as there is month between first and second national series race.
We did enduro experiment on last sunday at Calpis in order to improve our abilitys for DH. Also, it was good fun!
Oskar took impressive first place in juniors with his Zerode DH bike and Lauri Portti took third place with his Zerode with mud tires. I bet when they get on proper dh track their bikes will feel pretty light now!
I managed to get 16th place in elite gategory with my xc bike. It came out that 12cm of travel wasn't quite enough for this race that included only just over one minute long and pretty rough tracks. I am still happy how well i managed to push the limits of my bike, as i didn't crash once and on each track i got my time within about 1 sec on every lap, exept two last tracks of third lap where i pedalled all the leftover energy out and got about two secs better times than on last two laps.
Results: http://www.mtb-enduro.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Lopputulokset-Calpis-2014.htm
Yesterday we headed to sand hills i used to ride when i was a kid. Its easy to make any kind of tuff corners or sections on sand so i think it's good. Also i did slalom track on soft sand so that we were able to practise how to maintain speed. First we just rode down how we wanted to and then we had to do whatever lines that haven't been tried yet. That's how we got more ruts and how we got slalom even harder.
On thursday we had a bit rough day as Oskar sliced his shin with his brake disc in weird accident. It deffinetly wasn't anywere near small cut as we were able to see pretty much everything in his leg and that's why Oskar got ambulance ride to the hospital. He spent there one night and had a surgery, now everything is fine and he is resting last few days at switchbacks dh villa.
Other than that our trip has been great, we have had fun on our bikes and weather has been about 20°c everyday. Two days we rode and then we had a day off. It's good to take it easy and give your hands some time to adapt to ride long tracks, specially when we had young riders with us. Now we will be riding three days on row and then hopefully return to finland in one piece.
Today was the first riding day of ALDT training camp in Spain. All went well and bikes are great, nothing more to say really! I think we did about 11 or 12 runs today on tracks 3-4 minutes long.
We just got our new helmets for 2014 from octane.fi online store and they are so awesome! Make sure you visit octane.fi and check out what they got for you!
Thanks!
