by John Cane

Created on: April 23, 2008

First off, this is a silly question. It is like asking which is harder Chess or Hot Dog eating contests. In some sense, they both take some practice and strategy, but we are really comparing apples and oranges here. There are different factors at play in each.

In road riding, your strategy is of utmost importance. Despite being an endurance event, road racing is NOT about endurance. You must have a certain amount of endurance to compete with a certain group, but more important is your sense of timing, placement and knowing what kind of attack it right for your style. The strongest rider does not alway win a road race. The rider who does the most work rarely wins a road race. So a strong rider that spends the whole race attacking and chasing down other attacks will be tired at the end of the race and probably beaten by a lesser rider who just sat in the whole time. A strong sprinter who has been sitting in the whole race but waits to long to move up for the sprint will be beaten by a lesser rider who has good positioning. Learning positioning and and timing in road races is actually much harder that gaining the fitness to compete. Because of the strategy involved, it is actually not uncommon to have the whole field slow to a painfully slow speed simply because no one wants to risk their own chances and do more work than everyone else.

Mountain Biking by contrast is an all out effort for the entire event, but again effort is not the only thing involved. Bike handling skills are also very important. Because the object in mountain biking is to be going as fast as possible at all times (a contrast to road racing) there is always a limiting factor to your speed. This limiting factor is always one of three things 1) being stuck behind another rider 2) fear or simple inability to navigate a section any faster or 3) Physical strength. So on a technical section you may have fresh legs, but can't go any faster without crashing. In a wide open section you may be able to handle the bike going much faster, but just don't have the ability to pedal any faster. Doing the work involved is hard, and gaining the technical skills can be equally difficult.

So if we are truly comparing apples and oranges here, why did I come down on the side of Mountain Biking being harder. Well I guess what I focused on was how taxing the event is. Mountain Bikers typically can only race one race in a weekend. Because of the physical nature of the sport, the body needs more time to recover. Road racers can and often do race two to four times a week. Local series races will often schedule races on both Saturday and Sunday, and many racers will attend both. In addition, road riders may even race multiple events in a day. It is not uncommon to see a Cat 3 rider race in the 3/4 race, and then turn around and do the cat 1/2/3 race later in the day and have reasonable success in both races. Doing this two days in a row yields 4 races in a weekend which is unheard off in mountain biking. So while winning a road or mountain bike race is equally, but differently, hard, mountain bike racing get the nod because it is harder to recover from.

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