Something that I’m finding is increasingly limiting my ability to ride quickly is having time on twisty stuff to read the trail accurately.

Case in point today – playing on some new DH runs. Tight left berm into 4m gap stepdown, 10m of trail, 6m gap hipped stepdown. You can’t see the first takeoff until you’re almost on top of it (too much undergrowth on the inside of the berm) and you can’t see either of the landings until you’re actually airborn. Due to the jumps you need to hit it pretty fast – too fast for my eyes and brain to process what’s going on.

I got through the section basically by rote learning. Took me 4 or 5 attempts to teach myself what I needed to do to flow the trail. But once I’d got down it, I was very aware my brain had zero visual recollection of what went on between landing the first jump and landing the second, which is kinda scary…

I’ve had similar issues in the alps too. Getting gapped on blind hairpins by riders I can keep up with in other circumstances. They just whip round at full tilt whilst I’m still trying to work out where the trail goes. When I can see through the corner, I can stick with them easily – so it’s not a bike handling issue.

So how do I go about training myself to “see faster”?

(NB I’m not condoning riding faster than you can see to stop on public rights of way!)

try to visualise how the trail will look

Shoot me now, but I was freeloading MBR and there’s an interesting skills article in there this month about processing information while you’re riding – not dissimilar to what you’re talking about – and filtering out the extraneous stuff so you just focus on what’s important. It might be worth a look.

I think It’s all down to familiarity. Just ride the run time and time again. You can’t think while you ride, your brain can’t work that fast and it can only do one thing at a time – multi-tasking is a myth, even for women. Repetition will enable you to do things without thinking meaning you can look further and further ahead up the trail and fine tune your line according to the conditions of the day. Flow comes from knowing a few steps ahead what’s coming up so you can carry the right amount of speed.

This is going to sound daft but it works if you’re doing what I think you might be doing.

Do you think in questions? “where does this go?” How steep is the drop?”

If so, try thinking in facts. “trail goes left”. Even if you’re wrong, this gets replaced by another fact. “bugger, it goes right.”

Or perhaps you already do that in which case I’ve nothing for you over the internet.