Anthony Diaz hunches and rolls around a Missionary Ridge trail with baffling speed. His mountain bike floats up and over obstacles, enormous root systems and boulders emerging from the mountain. He darts like a fish through bending turns in the path and glides around cliffhangers that would cause most mountain bikers to panic.
Diaz, 30, is a professional Enduro mountain-bike racer – a hybrid of sorts – combining the elite fitness and stamina of a cross country mountain-bike racer with the skills and bravery of a downhill one. On any given ride, he’s flirting with the laws of gravity and testing principles of physics.
He’ll be joining about 180 other racers for this weekend’s Big Mountain Enduro in Durango, a rigorous second stop in a five-venue series that began in Aspen and will continue in Keystone, Moab and Crested Butte, where many of the world’s leading Enduro racers will be competing for an overall professional purse of $45,000.
On Saturday, the multi-stage event will send riders down the famed Colorado Trail from Kennebec Pass, and Sunday, racers will link the singletrack of the Telegraph Trail system in Horse Gulch.
Races are broken into stages: transition stages, or liaisons, challenge racers with ascents and cross country travel within a given time frame. But when the trail points down, the racers take off. In the special stage, the race stage, it’s game on. Here, they race a clock, and it’s every man and woman for themselves.
The bikes are engineering and technology marvels. Space-age metals and alloys, hydraulic disc brakes, tenacious tires of various rubber compounds and up to 6 inches of advanced front and rear suspension travel all allow riders to tear up and down over difficult terrain.
Big Mountain Enduro race promoter Sarah Rawley, who also competes, simply called it the spirit of mountain biking.
“The kind that most people love,” she said. “It blends both aspects. You have to be incredibly fit, and you have to be incredibly skilled. And you have to adapt to a lot of different terrain.”
In other venues such as Snowmass and Keystone, the course uses ski area lift access. In Durango, riders are completely on their own going in, and on Saturday, in remote wilderness.
“Durango is unique,” Rawley said. “You have to be a skilled rider to navigate the backcountry that fast.”
She also said it’s a game of experience.
“It’s the old guys’ sport,” she joked. “The majority of our participants are 30 or 35-plus. It takes years to develop that strength and fitness. It’s endurance over multiple days. It’s not just a five-minute run where you give it all you got.”
The scenic and terrifying Haflin Creek Trail, which loses more than 3,000 feet in less than 5 miles off of Missionary Ridge north of Durango, Diaz said offers a venue with diversity and is as good a course as it gets.
“On the perfect trail,” Diaz said. “You can flip a coin, and you don’t know who’s going to come out on top, the cross country racers or a pro-downhill guy.
“It doesn’t benefit anybody. If you’re a cross country racer, you have the power, but if you don’t have the skill to control your power, you’ve got nothing.”
Diaz, who took fifth place in last year’s Enduro in Durango, comes from a background in cross country and downhill racing but admits he is drawn to the excitement of flying over trails at jaw-dropping speeds.
Enduro racing is a fast-growing genre of cycling; in fact, so fast that many product developers are racing themselves to manufacture the appropriate equipment. The bikes are being driven by the sport.
When he’s not racing, Diaz, a trained mechanic, is doing custom rebuilds of bicycle suspensions from his shop in downtown Durango. One of a handful in the industry, he helps racers and joyriders alike fine-tune their rigs to fit their personality.
“I wanted to be in the bike industry, and I wanted the free time to ride, race and train,” he said. “Plus, I needed a job.”
He founded Diaz Suspension Designs. In an industry of mass-produced stock equipment, Diaz provides a custom element for patrons.
On racing, he said the hardest thing for him is the fitness.
“A lot of people say Enduro is not endurance,” he said, “But the guys who are winning these, they can win cross country races, too.”
Former Mountain Bike World Cup cross country racer Krista Park is riding Haflin Creek just hours after her doctor’s approval while recovering from a reconstructive clavicle surgery. She helps Diaz with his fitness regimen in return for his coaching her on skills. After racing all over the world, she traded cross country for Enduro racing two years ago and finished on the podium in all of last year’s BMEs, and won the Durango women’s category. In 2013, she ranked ninth in the North American Enduro Tour World Enduro Series.
She plans to race this weekend, but with a new metal plate on her collarbone. She said she’s “doing it just to ride.”
“The cool thing about it, if you like riding trails, you can do an Enduro,” Park said. “It just teaches you how to handle your bike.”
Rawley called it progress.
“The industry is always looking for that ‘something new,’ and Enduro is really that breath of fresh air that has brought a lot more people to the racing scene,” she said.
Diaz, somewhat concerned about Durango’s casual cruising while other destinations are leading the pack in gravity-oriented trails, said it all comes home to roost.
“Early in mountain biking’s history, there was downhill and cross country, and a lot of (racers) were racing both on the same bike. The way I see it, it’s coming back around to that.”
He said the competition is growing.
“You can’t let up,” Diaz said from his shop. “The second you stop pedaling, someone else is pedaling by you.”
bmathis@durangoherald.com
