The Dirt Warrior's Desiderata

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A Boutique Approach to Mountain Bike Coaching and Training

I am so glad you’ve stumbled across my mountain bike coaching website. The coaching philosophy you will find here is not like the hundreds of other coaching options out there with names like ‘Peak Performance,’ ‘Training Solutions,’ or ‘Fitness Specialists Inc.’ I am not here to show you that I am a great athlete and therefore if you train like I do you will be too. I am here to help you tune out the noise and guide you down the difficult path you have chosen. If you have made it this far in your athletic journey towards mountain bike riding mastery that you are ready to invest in coaching you have surely noticed the sheer quantity of mediocre drivel sprawled all over the internet about coaching and how to train for mountain biking. Generic plans with tiers like bronze, silver, gold, and premium memberships that run upwards of $200 month that you could probably figure out how to program yourself with fifteen minutes of ‘doing your own research.’ App subscriptions that will sync your Apple Watch to your Strava account to your Zwift to your Garmin to your power meter and analyze all your data for you. Seamlessly of course. How about all the fun YouTube video tutorials with pretty girls and fun graphics, and promises that this one key trick will unlock all the obstacles that are keeping you from realizing your potential? These aren’t lessons, they are marketing videos designed to get views. Don’t get me started on the silly video games on your peloton stationary bike designed to stroke your ego as you win a cartoonish Tour de France. None of this stuff makes you faster. None of this stuff improves your technical skills and bike handling. None of this prepares you for the challenges of high performance mountain bike riding. None of this conditions you for the mental demands and physical fatigue you will experience racing. It is digital slop. It is designed to steal your time, your focus, your attention, and your MONEY. Read that again. If you want to improve in this exceedingly difficult sport you will not train like a keyboard warrior. You will not indulge in clickbait. You will not buy expensive digital fitness devices of negligible value. You will not rely on a numerical value generated by one of these devices to analyze the organic and spiritual substance of your being. You will learn how to better listen to your own mind and body. You will train and prepare for the extreme mental and physical demands of high level mountain biking like an actual warrior.

The Dirt Warrior’s Desiderata is a coaching philosophy based on personal growth, stimulating curiosity, and lifelong learning to foster longevity in the sport. You will not find any short cuts, secret tricks, or magic bullets here. Those are a fantasy. They don’t exist in this world. This is an approach that values a slow, steady, and continual sharpening of the sword. There is no destination, no summit, no peak of the pyramid. You will embrace the mind set that your ‘blade’ will never be sharp enough but you will enthusiastically seek to make it ever sharper.

I believe that EVERY rider can improve their skills and fitness, using intelligent and defined goal setting as a Northstar for progress and motivation. Unlike other generic coaching programs all of the training plans include a four week intensive intake/onboarding program. This period is a chance for coach and athlete to get to know each other and for the coach to learn about the athlete’s past athletic history, current ability levels, training parameters, lifestyle, and level of flexibility with a program to fit around the athlete’s other life obligations. At the beginning and end of onboarding performance testing and analysis for the athlete will be done to assess current skills and build a customized training plan, and the coach will work with the athlete to define goals and outline the mental training components that are a core part of the training and coaching program.

Mountain Bike Coaching Expertise

Tailored coaching and training plans designed around your busy life and budget. I understand that your time and money are valuable. I design training plans for athletes with as little as 5-8 hours per week to workout and plans for the serious competitor and elite rider who are searching for their next breakthrough. I run private and group skills workshops to target every aspect of mountain biking. I believe coaching is as much an art as a science and always seek to build coach/athlete relationships built on flexibility, a determination to develop together, a willingness and desire to tinker and adjust the programming, trust, and a commitment to longevity in the sport.

Depth of Experience: I have been riding mountain bikes for more than three decades and coaching mountain biking for almost a decade. I have worked extensively with juniors, masters, novices, and elites across all disciplines of mountain biking, from cross country racing to free riding and dirt jumping. I have coached athletes to state championship podiums and through the big jump lines at their local bike park. I am a registered coach through NICA, Training Peaks University and USA Cycling. I heavily emphasize and invest in mental training techniques with all of my athletes. My intake/onboarding process is rigorous and unique and always includes a detailed athlete interview, a four week block plan beginning with athlete evaluation, a trial workload period followed by a week of rest and recovery, and a second evaluation and next steps. There are so many generic training plans available, but few that involve the level of personalization that the Dirt Warrior’s Desiderata provides.

Testimonials

In late spring I hired Coach Pete to design a twelve week training plan to help me prepare for the Winter Park Tipperary Creek cross country mountain bike race. From the intake process through my race Pete worked with me to implement an efficient plan that fit around my busy life at work and as a mom, helped me define then refine my training and race goals, checked in with me often to see how my workouts were progressing, and adjusted and adapted my plan around an unexpected family event that kept me off my bike for a week leading up to the race. The workouts that Pete designed for me were specific and meant to clearly target weaknesses in my fitness and technique that we identified. Pete’s emphasis on mental resilience training and differentiating the demands of racing vs. training were as demanding as the workouts he prescribed. I showed up on race day feeling calm, confident, and prepared and had a terrific race experience! I can’t wait to work with Pete during the off season to plug some holes in my strength and mobility and take it up a notch next year. -Mariah from Boulder

I began mountain biking as an adult in my 40’s and after three seasons of riding I felt like my skills had really plateaued. Despite riding several times a week I wasn’t seeing much improvement in my riding. I hired Coach Pete for 1 on 1 private skills lessons where we focused primarily on navigating steep switchbacks and descending steep, technical, rocky terrain. He was patient, attentive, curious about my journey, did a great job of breaking down skills into manageable chunks, and really helped me with evaluating and perceiving risk. Not only did he help me feel safe and confident, he also taught me how to analyze sections of trail better so that I could effectively work on these skills by myself. He never overloaded me with information, and always seemed to have one or two simple, applicable tips to work on at a time for any given skill. -Kelly from Golden

After a few serious crashes in my 60’s I began looking for a cycling and supplemental exercise program to increase my strength and range of motion with the hopes that I can keep riding my mountain bike well into my 70’s and beyond. I appreciate Coach Pete’s well rounded approach to injury prevention, flexibility, and strength conditioning while acknowledging that crashes can and probably will happen again. In addition to working on specific bike skills, Pete developed a balance, proprioception, flexibility, and weight lifting program that was easy to follow and implement, and showed me strategies to evaluate trail features based on the principles of ‘commit fully or walk your bike’ (my crashes, when we discussed them, all stemmed from ‘semi-commitment’) Pete never suggested that I was too old to be crashing or too set in my ways to learn new skills and always did a great job understanding my goals and limitations. -Paul from Loveland