The Warrior Philosophy Approach to Mountain Bike Coaching and Training
I am so glad you’ve happened across my mountain bike coaching website! The coaching philosophy you will find here is different from the myriad other coaching options out there. In our modern era the prevailing winds of sports science place ever more emphasis on fine tuning the data points the human body generates with ever more precise and sophisticated gadgetry. The sports science I rely on is based on the vast realm of warrior literature, some of it 3,500 years old, and approaches the relatively new sport of mountain biking with the time tested principles of warrior training. The clinics, classes, and training programs I offer are structured around curiosity, growth, sharpening the way we direct our attention and focus, and understanding the importance of process based goal setting, Realizing our potential in this demanding sport has more to do with strengthening our minds and our resolve than surviving complicated interval workouts. 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. There are tons of coaches out there who operate on that principle and they are easy to find. I am here to help you tune out the noise and help guide you down the difficult path you have chosen. If you have made it this far in your athletic journey towards mountain biking mastery that you are ready to invest in coaching you have noticed the overwhelming quantity of coaching options for mountain biking. So many coaches offer generic plans with tiers like bronze, silver, and gold memberships that run upwards of $200 month that you could probably figure out how to program yourself with half an hour of ‘doing your own research.’ There are app subscriptions that will sync your Apple Watch to your Strava account to your Suunto to your Garmin to your power meter and analyze all your data for you. Seamlessly of course. Youtube is filled with video tutorials of pretty girls, neat graphics, and promises that this one key trick will unlock all the obstacles that are keeping you from realizing your potential. Are those lessons or marketing videos designed to get views? Peloton and Zwift have ‘gamified’ training on a stationary bike. If your goal is to lose some weight and start an exercise program these tools may help you. If your goal is high performance mountain bike riding and racing these tools are wholly insufficient. None of it prepares you for the difficulty of this sport. None of it conditions you for the mental demands, high stress, and physical fatigue you will experience in competition. It is digital slop. It is designed to divert your time, your focus, and your attention. Read that again. Enduring fitness, technical skills, and bike handling finesse are the product of demanding, consistent, and straightforward physical and mental training. If you want to improve in this exceedingly difficult endeavor 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 tune in to your own mind and body. You will train and prepare for the extreme mental and physical demands of high level mountain biking following the same learning path of the warrior class applied in modern ways to realize your potential.
The Dirt Warrior’s Desiderata is a coaching philosophy based on stimulating curiosity, self growth, 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 and don’t exist in this world. This is an approach that values a slow, steady, and continual sharpening of the sword based on millennia old practices. There is no destination, no summit, no peak of the pyramid. You will embrace the mindset that your ‘blade’ will never be sharp enough but your task will be to make it ever sharper.
EVERY rider can improve their skills and fitness, using intelligent and defined goal setting as a Northstar for progress and motivation. It is from this philosophy that all other aspects of improvement trickle down. Unlike other cookie cutter coaching programs all of the training plans include a four week intensive 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 considerations, and level of flexibility needed within a program to fit around the athlete’s other life obligations. The beginning and end of onboarding will be bookended by time trial testing for fitness and analysis of current technical ability level. This is done to assess strengths and weaknesses 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 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. Our lives on the bike are a reflexion of what we do off the bike, and vice versa. While the expert lives to train the master trains to live!
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. While I am certified with NICA, Training Peaks University, and USA Cycling my coaching philosophy veers away from the data driven and technology oriented focus these organizations lean on. I heavily emphasize and invest in mental training techniques with all of my athletes, believing that the physical strength of athletes is a by-product of intelligent, targeted goal setting, mental control, and resilience. My intake/onboarding process is rigorous and unique in the industry and always includes a detailed athlete interview, a four week block plan beginning with athlete evaluation, a trial workload period followed by several days of active 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 and dedication to progress through process based learning that the Dirt Warrior’s Desiderata provides.
Testimonials
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