(bell rings)
(patriotic music swells)
- Today, I have a very special friend, Tim Johnson,
welcome to the show.
- Good to see ya.
- It's great to see you, too, thank you for being here.
If you guys don't know, Tim Johnson is a
three-time national cyclocross champ.
A friend, we've done duel many times.
- Oh, many battles.
- Some great battles over the years.
Today though, we're in Washington state
for the USA National Cyclocross Championships
and I coerced Tim into showing us a couple tips in the mud.
- [Tim] Yeah, I think it's going to be muddy out there.
I'm pretty sure.
- [Jeremy] Why aren't you wearing any gloves?
- Who needs gloves, I mean you really have to get
really cold, really wet, to need gloves.
Come on, this is fine, just a little bit of rain.
- (laughs) Let's go.
(dramatic techno pop music)
- All right Tim, so we're going to look at mud.
There's so many different kinds of mud on the course.
There's peanut butter mud--
- [Tim] We could be here for hours talking about
all the different kinds of mud.
(laughing)
- Yeah, this is like more of a glazey,
kind of on the top, not super heavy.
But there are heavy sections, there's deep mud as well.
We're going to fly down this ramp with a ton of speed
at like an elite level.
- [Tim] Fly in there, hit the brakes, take the turn,
and we'll see how it goes.
- Yep, okay.
You lead it out.
- [Tim] All right.
(brakes squealing)
- [Jeremy] In the grass.
I've got traction.
- [Tim] All right so here's just one way to do this corner.
We're going to stay on the right-hand side in the grass,
and we're going to cut across the rut
and then find some more grass on the other one.
- I love it.
- Ready?
- Yep.
- So I've got plenty of traction here.
So much so that I can look up, see where I'm going.
Find some more grass here.
And then I can accelerate out of this corner.
- Yeah, grass everywhere sets you up for the next--
- Everywhere!
And we're going to line 'em all up!
(dreamy electronic pop music)
- All right TJ, so we're going to take a little,
little bit of a different approach
on this nationals track here.
Opposite direction, but it gives us a great place
to be able to kind of lay out some of these skills.
So if we were coming down this, there'd be two lines
coupled into a really gnarly off-camber into a runoff.
- [Tim] Yep, a lot of times I see people
wanting to take a corner too fast.
They want to go into it fast, they want to stay fast
and they want to get out of there fast.
(laughter)
Which those three things usually means
that someone's going to hit the ground.
- [Jeremy] So a lot of people probably think that this line
on the left, obviously faster, more direct,
is going to be better, but you're going to go
on the right-hand side, and I think--
- [Tim] Well, I don't know, I mean
it depends if I have traction.
You're on the straighter line,
so we'll have to see what happens.
- [Jeremy] I know, but this is dangerous,
I'm going to have to scrub a ton of speed!
This is like, this is scary.
All right ready, three, two, one, go!
(brakes squealing)
- Whoo!
(dreamy electronic pop music)
- Okay, so you guys probably can't tell
how steep this section actually is,
but it is very, very steep.
- [Tim] Jeremy, where have you been?
I've been looking for you this whole time.
I was ready to go and I just figured
if you weren't ready, I was just going to get going.
(Jeremy laughing)
- With this section, no we don't go up.
We're going down it and TJ's going to tell us
all about how to do it.
So, this is very steep and it looks to me
like there's only one line in there.
- Yep, well there's a reason why it's UCI Only
because it's really sketchy.
A big thing that you want to do
with a section like this is to really look at it,
get an idea of what you're dealing with
before you have to do it at speed.
But it's really important to pick a good line.
- [Jeremy] Tell me why we want to hit a rut.
- [Time] Well sometimes you want to hit a rut
just to actually get into a groove, like a train on tracks.
So you want to make sure you're in it, stay in it,
and you ride it all the way to the end.
People get into trouble when they get into a rut
and they want to get out, right in the middle.
They want to jump out of the rut.
And it's too deep, it's impossible to crush.
Or, they get stuck in a rut and they're like,
"Oh, I don't know what to do!"
- So how do they stay in it?
- Well it's really about riding the entire rut.
Really making sure that you're committed to the rut,
you're working the whole way through it
and you want to stay loose.
A lot of people ride too stiff and they
fight the rut, front wheels banging side to side
inside the rut, you want to kind of loosen up
and just let it ride.
- Yeah, okay all right.
Well then, you go first.
- Oh good!
Never ridden this before so we'll see how it goes.
(dreamy techno pop music)
(brakes squealing)
Nice, we're good, come up.
- Tim, one of the other things that we,
I see you doing, you famously always got that leg out.
- It's a body English thing,
but it's also kind of counterweight.
So I can generally go faster,
hold a little bit more traction for longer
if I've got my inside leg out.
As you mentioned, Johnny Tomac,
huge inspiration to early mountain bikers like ourselves.
He, I had a poster of him doing that on my wall
growing up and it was the best thing ever.
So you want to try and do that
when you know you've got a little bit more
traction than you need, trying to get some more speed,
it's a little bit risky but it has a good payoff.
- Also, it's kind of the "oh no" moment, right?
- Could be.
(laughter)
Could be, yeah.
- You've got a leg there It's a good save.
- To save you.
- It's a good save, yeah.
- Well, there's definitely going to be
a lot of legs out this weekend.
- [Tim] Yeah, I think so.
(upbeat techno pop music)
- Whoa! And then just turn right.
Get out, boom.
Second corner.
- So yeah, so what I saw you fly down here
you hopped onto this patch of green grass, scrub speed,
and then shot a straight line into the turn.
- It's really important to brake where you have traction.
So you can't brake in something this slick,
this muddy, it's going to be different every single lap,
but you know that when there's grass like that,
sand like that, you can get some traction.
- Okay perfect, let's try it out.
- So as Jeremy's coming in, he's going to be scrubbing
some speed right there, entering the corner
he's going to be in control he's going to start to
look through the corner, but he's already
going to have changed his speed
from the straightaway to the corner
when he had the ability to do so.
Not in the corner itself.
- Okay Tim, so standing water on a course.
That happens.
- It does, it's rare, but when it happens
you got to make sure you're ready for it.
So it's all about that fact-finding mission.
Talk to your friends, you watch the earlier races,
you get a chance to ride the course yourself
because you want to know what you're going to
put your wheels into.
- Right, you definitely don't want to be going into,
I mean this thing can be four feet deep!
A Lock Ness monster could be in there.
- At least alligators.
If it's not the Loch Ness,
it's definitely an alligator.
- We've got straight ruts here like this.
This is one of those sections where
I don't know, you tell me.
- [Tim] You want to make sure that you're riding straight
with your body in a nice neutral position,
your head up so you're really focusing
on where you want to go rather than rut to rut.
And so you want to be able to let your bike
ride underneath you as you continue forward.
However it gets there.
You just don't want to get trapped in the big ruts.
- Tim, in quest for green grass,
we see it all the time.
This is the one that a lot of riders are riding
but we both know this is dangerous.
- It's like it's magnetic, you know
the tape just draws you towards it,
you want to ride as close as you can
and undoubtedly, somebody will get their handlebars
stuck in that tape and hit the deck.
- And that looks like here, somehow
the bar tape magically wraps around
and then it's, "Oh no! Ooooh!"
And then it takes you down.
And when you go down, in the United States
we use a lot of this ribbon like this
but in Europe they use rope.
And that rope doesn't move.
- No, rope on a wooden post that's four inches thick,
no there's nothing that's going to move when that happens.
Broken handlebars, broken shifters, broken fingers.
Just stay in the middle, stay off the tape,
and go as fast as you can.
- Tim, we'd be remiss to not talk about
tire pressure when we're talking about mud.
- It's cyclocross.
We talk about tire pressures all the time.
- What is the lowest pressure you think you ever ran?
- [Tim] I think on purpose I might have
set my bike up at like 16, 15 psi.
But I would have been thinking the entire time,
"I'm going to flat at any second."
- [Jeremy] Yeah, what are running now, your set up?
You have tubeless tires.
You like that, does that work for you?
- [Tim] Yeah, so with tubeless it's really easy.
You can run a pretty low pressure
and not have to worry about pinching
any kind of tube inside that tire,
so I've actually ridden these as low as 20.
I think the newer tubeless technology
like this Vittoria with the Zipp wheels,
it's not going to rip off the rim
like the old tubeless would.
And that's what made us really apprehensive
about using it. - Of course.
- So I really like tubeless for what it does now.
It's great.
- I want to say thank you so much for being on the show.
If you guys like this video,
and you enjoyed Tim's mud tips,
please give this video a thumbs up.
That guy gave it one.
- Big fan.
- Yeah, and if you guys want to leave us a comment
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