Vital’s Bikes: Unaffiliated Podcast - Community Conversation

If anything DH riders and athletes in general are more professional in their training and racing nowadays, but a lot of times when an athlete says they are here to win, crush their opponents etc… a bunch of people online talk shit: “you need to be more humble”, “you aren’t good enough to talk like that”. DH is smaller but even Loic was getting tons of comments on Vital and PB calling him arrogant and hating on him because he said he wants to beat Jackson. Which of course he does, if he didn’t he would not still be racing downhill. In bigger sports like road cycling you see this all the time which leads to riders giving interviews where they say nothing. There’s also the aspect of riders not wanting to put additional pressure on themselves which makes sense. 

Please don’t change the fantasy system, if you do it’ll be the same as pinkbikes and theirs is boring as hell since starting to play the vital one, you pick your team and they have a crash in qualies.. great, fantasy team wrecked for the whole weekend. 
The Vital system encourages you to come back over the race weekend and make tweaks based on what you see .. it rains for finals day? Shit better change the team, rider B had fast splits in qualies but a minor mistake? That’s a sleeper, I’ll add him etc..

I think some tweaks to scoring, not when the lockdown happens, would be good. I don't recall the exact rules. It did feel that it was more of a math challenge instead of who would win as far as points go as the season went on. Possible put heavy points on the top 5 and way less on the other results. Make it more of a rifle and not a shotgun approach. 

Spomer,

Hope you get your health straight. 

It's called vasovagal syncapy.

I know because over the winter I had breakfast with my parents. Dropped a bowl while doing dishes and cut my shin open. 

Like an idiot, I bent over at the waist, looked at my shin and said something like " fuck that's going to need stitches". Not very big cut but right on the shin bone. 

Immediately got very lightheaded, fortunately managed to sit down before fully blacking out. 

Woke up in the kitchen, with my mom, dad, and 2 very nice firemen. I couldn't think well enough to make a decision if I needed to go to the hospital. So I got to meet 2 very nice paramedics on the ambulance, a handful of Dr.s and nurses as "the guy who got attacked by the dishwasher."

Then about a month later got a full cardiac workup.

Never even got an explanation of why it happened, just got a funny story and a new scar. 

I had a bad reaction to the 2nd dose of the COVID vaccine. Passed out, fell, and put my head through my bathroom door. 

+1 to keep the fantasy team lock after Q2. It's way more fun to play than the pinkbike one.

@notthatbryan - crazy story! and yeah, i forgot "syncopy" in the term. the human body is fascinating.

re: fantasy, i think we'll keep normal timing after Q2 like last year and will discuss rider values. thanks for the input, everyone. 

Thank you for having me on the show! And slight, but important correction… I am a Psychologist 😬 ✌🏾👊🏾

Just saw this yesterday.. After a mental health day yesterday and listening to the Pulp Philly review today, this will be the listening for tomorrow's commute.. Should be good..

When competing in the rain, I always try and remember that little kid me would have loved to play in the rain. Everyone is bitching about the rain, and I'm thinking " I get to play in the rain".

This was so good... I can listen to JRich all day.. Obviously very smart, well spoken, and his story telling ability is amongst the best. Thankfully, he said he's not going to read the comments...

The part about the ants really hit home for me. I remember being at Nellis around 07, I had an awesome weekend. Wasn't outside top 3 all weekend, a couple of wins.. I was stoked, but I couldn't get too excited because I knew I wasn't going up against the heavy hitters that were NBL east coast guys..

@Jason_Schroeder your mountain biking reminds me of my bmx racing. I raced mainly because I loved the riding. Everyone telling me that I should go pro, but I didn't because there would be less opportunities for me to race. And, I knew that outside a select few, you weren't making a living at it back then..

Great pod guys... Definitely should bring JRich back..

Thanks for your time! This made great listening on a training slog of a ride I was in the middle of. I've come to racing pretty late in life and I'm trying to figure out how to get my head in the game knowing that my racing "hobby" isn't going to amount to much. Your thoughts were super helpful and I'm looking forward to hopefully hearing more! 

This Vital podcast has become one of my favorites.  Thanks for the good listening.  Where are the podcast notes?

I second this! Always a good listen. Good work boys!

what's the story of oregon enduro series? I raced a couple when they were in year 2 or something, but don't know what happened there......

When Schroeder went over the split times, I came to a rather obvious realization. He did something very different in sector 3 that amplified the advantage he pulled in sector 4.  Would love to see what that was.  It was a BIG jump in time.  Tonight I want to go back and look at the last few hundred yards of sector 3 to see what that chunk of track looked like.

The Enduro = WRC racing is spot on. Both are awesome forms of racing that are held back by how difficult it is to do good coverage. 

I’ve been enjoying the coverage of EDR that we’ve had for Loudenvielle. Elliot Heap is really good, especially at the rider interviews and the highlights are a decent mix of raw videos and head cams. Very enjoyable. 

I agree 100%. Those guys looked like they were racing but having such a great fun time. And the scenery. OMG. How to not be distracted by the mountains and crash. Concentration 😀

The only thing is the death of ews has taken some media engagement out of national/regional level racing as well.  Which does decrease overall participation as well as limits the opportunities for people to get paid to race them.  

In the UK the bigger enduro events like Ard Rock/Moors, Ex, Bolly etc all sell out within minutes. I do a few local ones too and the numbers are probably slightly down on what they were 5-10 years ago but still getting a couple of hundred entries for each round which seems decent numbers. 
the Misspent Summers newsletter was also saying that the numbers of entrants for Loudenvielle were up on previous year/s which is a good sign. 
I think enduro for those not looking to make a living out of racing is still doing well.