Grassroots Enduro... Where Should It Go?

Montana Enduro director here. This idea has legs. Last year our local course (Helenduro) was shorter than I've done for a while. We don't provide any uplift at this race, so it's all earned. Last year was five stages in 14 miles, with 2,700 climbing. I wasn't in love with the course, but everyone told me it was one of their favorites, even long-time repeat racers. I'm bearing that in mind when designing this year's route.

Regarding routes, we do our best. Blind racing was a core component of the original format, but doing that in the States is very challenging. I come at it with route choice. In 15 years of the Helenduro, we've only reused a route once and that was a deliberate 10th anniversary nod to the first race. It's tough to create a fun and fresh route in the same trail network every year, but I through in a lot of trails, segments, or combinations that nobody is riding otherwise. We don't announce the route until the Wednesday before the race.

This gets harder at parks. That's has been one of the coolest parts of the NAEC, as the lower 2/3 of Silver has mostly grown through new trails that had first descents at NAEC. They've also been able to do a few "one weekend only" stages. Most other parks aren't doing that kind of expansion. It was sweet that Whitefish rerouted one of their steeper trails onto a fresh loamer last summer, though.

Looking to the future, even local events are feeling the bike industry's post-COVID sugar high crash. We still have healthy numbers, but they're not as high as they were immediately after the pandemic. In '21-'23 we sold out rapidly and had to manage big waitlists. Numbers were down for us last year (and for other events and series based on word-of-mouth), and advance sales were slower. Registrations ramped up in the two weeks before the race as people started to feel more confident about their travel plans. My personal feeling is that DOGE layoffs hit the Northern Rockies harder than some other parts of the country. Grassroots racing survives while it's something meaningful to grassroots riders and in my view that's a fun day and a sense of community. 

race promoters: don’t call it Mini Duro, call it Sprint Enduro.  

If you only have a few short stages, have your more advanced fields race them multiple times to reach ideal stage and journey times to please your customers.   

When i’ve run Sprint Enduro format in the past, I’ve made sure at least one of the stages is in a grassy field with ruts and flat corners, like a proper NORBA DS.   It’s badass seeing the scholastic kids on hardtails ripping up flat corners in front of their gathered homies.

* Prize pool, having a pro category without prize money makes no sense and communicates the wrong thing. 
* tape the trails incentivizing fair competition 
* bring in sponsors. It used to be at a race cascadia race evo and others were there supporting the race. 
* support the viewers. Give them a reason to stick around, help them find viewing spots and bring in vendors to the race. 

https://www.hotlapsmtb.com

Thanks for the invitation but that’s 11,264 km for me so that’s a little bit too far. 😀

While I'd personally quite like timed liaisons, it doesn't work practically when you have a 15 minutes queue to start the stage, or there's an injury red flag. And gets awfully complicated when eebs and meat-bikes are mixed

I know this needs more staff/volunteers, but especially for the ebike category, I would love to see a format where you get to race the stage as many times as you want, best time counts.

Let's say you have 3 stages, first one is open from 9-12, second one from 11-2 and last one from 1-3. That way regular bikes could get 3-5 runs in depending on fitness, ebikes could potentially pump out 6-9 runs. Makes the frustration of catching a rider or crashing less of a problem.

As a middle-aged mostly ebiker, spending $X to spend most of the day in a queue, waking up at 7am getting home at 5pm, most likely getting blocked on the stage by 3-4 different riders and only having done something like 30km and 1200m of climbing makes no sense.

The "Grassroots Enduro Series" in Ireland does (did? I moved away a few years back) that. 

The venues are usually relatively compact (as are the Irish mountains) and all stages are open from say 0900 to 1500 and you can race the stages as many times as you like in whatever order you wish.

Always a good day out with (for me) the focus on riding fun new (to me) trails with a bunch of mates. Cheap entries too. 

EDIT: Link to series website: https://grassrootsenduro.com/

Bring back cascadia championships. Enduro Saturday, DH Sunday. Favorite race of the year 

It is amazing to see so much community engagement around this question. 

We have a large property in Northern California (about 3-hrs from the Bay Area) and are assessing whether there would be sufficient demand for a glamping destination with a focus on mountain biking. 

We have explored the possibility of a trans-style enduro, individual enduro races, and an enduro series. We did a UCI DH series there last fall and it was really cool.

Do you feel there is a market there for a permanent home for enduro and DH racing in NorCal? 

If you would like to give input, please feel free to reach out. 

this is how the grassroots enduro events are run on the east coast of Australia. It's called superflow. The tracks aren't gnarly but usually high speed at race pace. You have I think from 9am till 3pm to put your best time down on 3 stages. 

https://rockytrailsuperflow.com/

https://rockytrailsuperflow.com/race-guide/fox-superflow-race-guide/

hello !

I am deeply concerned that our beloved discipline is dying just for marketing purposes and left behind like useless theme instead of aknowlege that enduro pushed the MTB development further more that all of us canned imagine !!!

I hope the resurgence of venues like "super enduro" back in the day( ITALY ) or the allmountain race by mavic

but hope that people like you at grassroots endure the sport all what is nedded to avoid its decline. 

PEACE and HAPPY TRAILS !!!

As someone who's never raced an enduro, but has considered it for several years, a huge turnoff is the Friday practice days.  I've got a limited number of vacation days, most of which get claimed by my family, especially around the holidays.  I actually like the idea of blind racing Saturday better than practicing for a day before.  I know one of the Downieville races is done like this now, and have a buddy who did that as his first race and loved it.  Sure locals will still have the edge, but they will regardless.  I guess it's harder to execute here in California given the limited number of locations that could legally host races, further limited by the number of trails each one could use for the course.

Part of the turn-off for me of the practice day is the thought of doing 2 huge days of riding in a row.  I'd also rather do one long day of blind racing rather than do a normal day of riding for practice followed by a normal day of riding for racing.  For me, the appeal of getting off my ass and signing up for an enduro race would be the challenge of going out and doing a big day of riding on trails new to me, with a secondary benefit of seeing how I handle it compared to other dads my age.

The locations of the "Trans" races are very appealing to me but cost is a concern.  Trans Sierra Norte is a DREAM event, but you know what is even more appealing?  Not spending thousands of dollars to go sleep in a tent, and instead getting a house rental with friends and hiring a guide.  I'm in my 30s and not going pro anytime soon.  I'm not competing for the top spot so I don't understand why I would shell out the kind of money to "race for fun" when I could grab a few friends and ride the exact same trails.  

That's my line of thinking for all racing these days anyway.  If I'm not pushing for results there is no reason to spend the $$$ when I could go to any location on my own time and ride whatever I want, whenever I want.

For real I'd do some small for fun events if it was only 12.5 mi days. I don't want to spend money to race at distances that my out of shape lazy tail could barely finish much less try to "race". There's the occasional one here I should try. 

Did enduro die? I think the reality is it just got hyped up way more than anyone epxected when over a couple of years lots of injured / tired / semi competiitve / older DH riders jumped on board. That naturally dragged lots of sponsors into the sport, more manufacturers saw the sport was buzzing etc etc. Granted yes the Moir, Hill, Rude, Barel days were sick and blew the sport up but those guys would eventually leave as the sport was their exit strategy. Young kids love DH, i always did even when i did not have a DH bike, i rode my regaular bike as fast i could downhill and pushed back up. Enduro made pedalling between stages seem fun, but we all know its not - unless your super fit. E bikes gave people the buzz of DH on the downs and we felt like enduro riders on the ups. Thats a ramble, what the answer?? Maybe just let the sport simmer away and mature - it grew up way too fast and that never good. I think the more DH grows - which it clearly is again, people will trickle back in.

I'm not a racer (I used to race XC a long time ago) but I do help build and maintain a small network of trails in rural Northern CA. Our group has considered hosting a race to showcase the area and hopefully raise some money to build new trails. This has been interesting to read. The trails are pretty well suited to the "mini-enduro" format with lots of ~500-700 foot descents. Unfortunately, some of the climbing is on public (low-traffic, rural residential) roads, although we are working on building more climbing routes.

Do folks here think grassroots racing as a way to support trail groups has legs? Would you be more likely to sign up for a race if it was in a new venue and/or explicitly funneled money to trail construction? This kind of thing would be a big lift for a group like ours but I'd imagine we aren't alone.

The trail org I'm involved with is doing just that this spring, hosting an enduro race to encourage more involvement from our community in trail work and advocacy. We're going to try and copy a lot of the stuff Trans-Cascadia has done with trail days beforehand that allow folks to trade sweat equity for entries. To our group, an enduro race seemed like the best format to get folks talking and foster those relationships. Hope yall can get something similar going without too much hassle! 

that’s probably the most likely reason I’d ever enter. 

Another Montana Enduro organizer here. The short answers are yes and yes. 

This is exactly what the Montana Enduro Series does for the Montana Bicycle Guild: The MES raises money for MBG's trail work and trail advocacy. Every penny from the MES goes back into the nonprofit trail org. we've used this model since 2014. Putting on enduro races has helped us build and maintain some really great trails, and helped us make our community a better place to live and ride bikes.

This model works if everyone has the right mentality and priorities. If those aren't aligned, it can quickly fall apart. Egos and money have wrecked more than their fair share of races and series trying to this kind of thing.

Be forewarned, it is a slow process. If you end up with a bit of cash from a race or two, it takes a lot of time to earn the trust of the land managers and the community. Even if you have that on lockdown, you’ll get all kinds of people coming out of the woodwork once there’s a bit of momentum to try and knock you back. For example, we are a year into building a new, 30+ mile project in our back yard here in Helena, MT. Most of the groundwork was laid a decade ago. Then it was seven years of planning and process. Once that was all done, the lawsuits started because some people didn't like the result of the process. It takes a lot of time, patience, commitment, and playing by the rules to get stuff done.

When it comes down to it, putting on enduro races is a ton of fun. I get to hang out (and be stressed out a bit) with really rad people in cool places and ride bikes. A lot of that is due to the leadership we have in our organization (that'd be @evasive, in case you're curious), and creating a place where a lot of people can actually do good work.

Learn from those who’ve done it and made the dumb mistakes (there are plenty of us). You’ll find a lot of support in other organizers. We're real people and do care about enduro and putting on bike races. We can talk for days about timing software, insurance, race plate design, course design, and the 238 other things that go into putting on a good enduro race.

All that to say: Do it. Put on a race and raise money to build something you’re proud of for your community. After 12 years of doing this kind of thing (plus some other things that've come up along the way), I can honestly say that I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Chiming in to say that I've been a huge fan of Race Cascadia since I did my first enduro at capitol forest in 2015. I was a high schooler and riding a $500 hard tail. My brake pads wore out, my chain broke, it was ridiculously muddy and I got last place. I was hooked. 

I also got to race 2022 EWS rounds in Scotland, Austria/Slovenia, Italy and Whistler. I also did the Tasmania rounds of the first season of "EDR" and saw some of the changes that the Warner Brothers merger/takeover created. I also backpacked between most of these races and even got covered by the EWS media team, who in my experience were good people and seemed passionate about the sport. 

All that to say, I have a lot of opinions about enduro. 

I think the downfall of EWS was that Chris Ball had to focus on putting on DH and XC world cups so Enduro was no longer the only child, but instead the oldest child. Once the series got to europe the edr races were sometimes put on a random Tuesday before a DH etc. Basically world level enduro lost most of its promotion, and without promotion there is not confidence from the brands to continue investing in athletes and as sponsors. 

They also completely changed the qualification system and got rid of a clear pathway for most fast "local pro" riders to aspire towards. It became much more like DH world cup qualification where you need to "build a relationship" with your local governing body (USAC etc) to get a national jersey, or be on a UCI team, instead of a clear points/results based qualification system. To me it was way cooler when Canada, WA, CA etc all had EWS qualifiers and if you got a win at a EWS affiliated local enduro, or 5 podiums, you were qualified to venture off and try to race with the best riders from all over the world. 

I find it interesting that whenever the death of world cup enduro comes up people reference the impossible feat of "live broadcasting" as the reason. When obviously EWS was very successful for years without live broadcasting.

I always thought that it would be interesting to have the top 10 racers in each category give POV footage of each stage and then a quick interview of the top riders after each stage to give context or explain if they felt good, almost crashed etc, then right after the race compile a mega video of side by side comparison of the top riders POV footage, interspersed with commentary from the riders themselves. Seems like the riders want to tell the story of their race anyways. Bonus would be some sort of interactive website where you could choose to watch certain riders side by side like this https://ridetop.app/compare_vs/?ids=315365464,312341607  or this https://ridetop.app/compare_vs/?ids=122443646,100266562

I think it would be fun to try and implement this kind of media coverage at a Cascadia Dirt Cup even, we have a healthy pro field and I would be fun to be able to see the top riders runs. 

As far as Saturday vs. Sunday, practice or no practice, ebikes etc. at the local level...

I think blind racing is great personally. And I bet the fastest would still be the fastest, especially over the course of a whole season. 

or, I think it would be fun to have ebike racing on sunday after the normal race, but as a no backup timing, low volunteer count, speedround, done by noon type of thing. On the same course as the day before, and if you wanted to practice you needed to ride the normal bike race on saturday. 

As far as WSCL connection, I got into mountain biking through the WSCL. I'm not sure why WSCL racers can't also do Cascadia Dirt Cup? My WSCL coaches and teammates raced Cascadia Dirt Cup and we organized carpools outside of official WSCL insurance or whatever.

Also shameless plug, we have the Galbraith Grassroots Series up in Bellingham in the spring. Any youth racers are welcome to join! A great warmup for the enduro season https://www.galbraithgrassrootsraces.com/

I'm curious about enduro racing, but being in the deep southeast the only organization consistently putting on races is the corniest fucking thing around. I kinda want nothing to do with them. 

That's too bad, local enduro is so much fun with a good organizer! Speaking to the two governing bodies commenting, I've raced both Cascadia Dirt Cup races as well as a Montana Enduro Series race (Jackson Hole) and both organizations are doing a great job. MES is definitely less intense, which I was expecting going into the race. The California Enduro Series does a fantastic job as well and I have raced several rounds of their series. I also raced the EWS that was in Sugarloaf, Maine in 2022 and for what it's worth I thought the above promoters were better organized. 

I hope grassroots enduro doesn't die, but I think eBikes have also shown us that few people want to do big pedal days or have any fitness goals related to mountain biking anymore. I think the idea of having a shorter Cat 1 course could definitely discourage sandbagging Cat 2, but that also seems to get away from the spirit of what enduro is. I find it funny when people racing Cat 1 or Pro complain about the amount of climbing. Don't you call yourself a professional? 

New venues is always a good idea too but I know getting approval for venus is difficult as it is. I'm sure most organizers have explored that route already. I guess I haven't really offered any ideas, but I think the fact that CDC is asking this question and MES is also chiming in is a really good sign for the health of the sport. Even though the EWS died, I hope enduro never does! I certainly will never become bored of it. 

I think I know the races you’re talking about… have you tried a Gravity Carolina’s race? Newer promoter out of Charlotte, I’ve done a couple and thought he did a great job. They’re racing at Rattlesnake this weekend, then Kanuga in a couple weeks. 

 

I'll check them out, thanks!

If you are Alabama-far south, Besides Gravity Carolina’s races, don’t sleep on Bump N Grind outside of Birmingham the 2nd weekend of June.

High quality promoters(this is year 32 of the XC race!) decent-enough field depth in intro classes.