How to Overcome Your Fear Of Descending
Often athletes express concern about descending fast, and we regularly have conversations at our training camps with athletes about their fear of descending. This article explores where that fear comes from and how to overcome it.
Triathletes have a bit of a bad rep when it comes to bike handling skills, and descending is the common area that people want to improve, and that’s linked to cornering. Descending at speed is the most challenging and a true test of skill. Athletes can quite literally freeze halfway down a descent. They may be comfortable riding at 30-35km/h on the flats, but suddenly, when there is a negative gradient, they restrict their speed to 10-20km/h.
What causes this fear?
Fear is multi-factorial. However, unless you have had a collision or bad experience, the fear of descending is likely to differ from a fear of open water, which is more about the unknown. Instead, it is expected to be based on the fear of what could happen. This is based more on our imagination and lack of trust.
You can demonstrate this easily - ride along comfortably and then start thinking about all the things that could go wrong with your bike: catastrophic failure of the front wheel, leading to you going over your handlebars. It would be hard not to slow down a little bit or, at the least, brace yourself for the imaginary impact! Equally, if you get to a comfortable speed and hear that there will be gravel coming up in 100m, your level of comfort at that speed will inevitably reduce, and you will probably slow down and freewheel.
What are these examples trying to show you? It isn’t that the fear you are experiencing is all made up! It is a real fear or concsn’t! They show how your body responds to these concerns you have. The mindset you don’t trust that the status quo will prevail, your start expecting a change, and your reactions change.
Rolling down a hill at speed is a function of trust in your own abilities, your equipment, the road, the environment and the predictability of the other road users. Let’s look at them together.
Trust in your own ability
Ultimately this is the main factor you can coach, control and improve. Furthermore, you can do it at every opportunity when riding the bike: a roundabout, slight drop, junctions etc. Adult riders often neglect bike handling skills in favour of smashing out more watts or hitting a weekly mileage target. Yet, this is the area that holds most athletes back the most.
There are really two skills that athletes must master to build confidence in descending. One is braking, and the second is cornering.
We won’t go into how to corner or brake effectively (you can check out this article on hairpins or attend some of our bike handling skills sessions. ), but let’s think about why they are essential.
Firstly braking is the main one. If a rider knows they can stop when they want to, they will have more confidence riding at faster speeds as they know if they get into difficulty, they can just stop.
This sounds obvious, but it is really powerful. How quickly you know you can stop defines how quickly you know you can go.
The second skill, cornering, is about balance, body position and looking at where you are going and is best improved through practice. Often practising or following other people who are faster than you in this skill helps you realise that you can go faster, and you keep testing just how fast that is.
Trust in your equipment
Confidence in your equipment is interesting and includes trusting the person looking after it. Do you trust that your headset is tight - did you do it, or did the person you trust do it? What do you need to do to have that confidence? It is about having a good friendship with a bike mechanic for some people! For others, it is about taking ownership. Either way, you don’t even worry about it when done correctly.
Experience in the equipment then is the next part. You can be a super confident descender on a mountain bike, but change to a road bike, and you may be less sure of your equipment, and your skills ability will reduce - not because of anything you have done but because you have made a change and are doing something you know on new kit. So you need to practice on the equipment you will be racing with. A common one here is riding race wheels only in a race. Unless they are the same as your training wheels, that difference in feel and response to the bike may actually slow you down on bigger descents.
Trust in the road, environment and other road users
The last three are grouped together because they all interact with one another, and you have very little control over them. This can be summarised with the simple tip of always riding as fast as possible with the knowledge you can stop on the road you can see. This means that your stopping distance, like when driving, will increase as you go faster and if the conditions deteriorate. That said, experience can make you faster. Knowing the road helps massively as you can expect the next order or change in the road surface. You may know where to look to see further down the road to know it is clear of other road users. Equally, if you regularly ride in wet conditions, then you have more confidence in your ability and equipment when stopping and cornering on damp surfaces - it’s one of the reasons we run some bike skills over winter. If you can do the skills in bad conditions, then dry conditions make it easier!
Equally, you will find that some hills flow better than others. For example, wider roads, smoother tarmac and no sudden stop at the bottom all give you the confidence to let the bike roll. If you know you need to stop at a junction at the bottom of a bumpy descent, you are unlikely to want to let the bike go too much! Some places are better for doing this. Often the roads abroad are much better quality (and sometimes the descents are longer), so you can get more practice in this, and remove the worry about the roads.
Your reaction to fear
People respond differently to fear, but tension is one of the first things they can control. As you get scared, people tend to tense up. This is unhelpful and actually makes the situation worse. Next time you are out on a safe stretch of road, grip your handlebars as tight as you can and try and corner or do a bit of a slalom. It will feel so different if you then relax and do the same movements. That reaction exacerbates any bad experience you have and dulls your skills. Recognising if you are tensing up Is a powerful way to exhale and relax your arms, which will improve your skills. This can be especially true in windy or wet conditions where people often seize up a bit. Try and relax.
How do we overcome being scared of descending?
Time to own up - I used to be terrified of descending. In fact, I still class myself as a poor descender and always see it as an area I want to improve. So perhaps, the honest answer is that you don’t ever get rid of the fear; just the speeds you can sustain increase! That said, I am now much more confident and love a long, fast twisty descent!
So how do we improve those speeds? By addressing the points above. Improve our bike handling skills. Actively go out and work on them. Can you find a bike handling skills session near you? If not, go back to being a kid, set up a small course in a garden or at the end of a car park, do slalom, stopping skills, etc., and challenge yourself to get a bit faster each time. Working on your bike skills will be the main thing to do.
Secondly, what must you do to have confidence in your bike and equipment? For many people, it will be different, so what works for you!?
Thirdly practice descending at speeds. Hill reps are excellent for this. Most people focus on a steep hill for the uphill benefits. Instead, find a descent or a loop that enables you to practice going up and down. This may mean that the uphill is pretty tame to what you may typically do to get "stronger". But over time, you should be able to improve your downhill speed. This is because you have more familiarity with the road, the environment and the other road users. (As much as you can). Then you can focus on the variable you want to improve - your bike speed or the actual descent itself.
As you gain confidence, go to a steeper, twistier or longer hill and regain your confidence. Over time you will have done (through repetition) several corners of different types and gradients. So your experience has improved, and you will be able to respond better to a new descent and a new corner. Knowing the road helps, so doing a recce of the bike loops you are racing can be very powerful. It will help your speed at all levels.
Finally, get outside more, especially in bad conditions. This will give you the experience of different conditions, confidence in your abilities and equipment and reactions to all sorts of weather.
Descending can be scary. Often you are pushing the limits of how fast you can go, but it can be a lot of fun too. When you get it right, the bike flows along beautifully, and you feel at one with the bike and the road, and it feels magical. So let’s focus on that. Descending is a trainable skill, but we must put ourselves in the environment and state of mind to practice it. The fear is normal, and most people experience it, but there are several tips in this article which should help you relax and have more confidence so that you too can begin to flow down the hills.
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has have coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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