What is it with mountain biking and motorbike hard enduro? First, moto stars Billy Bolt and Manuel Lettenbichler revealed their love for riding MTB (see Billy in our E-MTB vs Motorbike video and look out for a piece on Mani in our next issue), and now trials ace Chris Akrigg is channeling his inner hard enduro rider in his latest video, tackling all kinds of features at Parkwood Enduro on his Whyte E-160 RSX e-bike.
Check it out, then scroll down for a quick Q&A with Chris.
Portraits: Roo Fowler
Chris’s sponsors Whyte Bikes sat down with him to get the inside line on capturing ‘Hard Enduro RAW’ – the fun, the hard and the downright near-impossible…
Why hard enduro?
“I’ve been watching so much motorbike hard enduro recently. The riders are having so much fun just getting on bikes and riding. For me, it bridges the gaps between motocross, trials and everything in between. It’s pretty free-rein – I like that. It led to the locations for the edit – including a motorbike enduro location – and it also meant I wanted to keep the riding a lot more flowing, as you would on an enduro bike. That’s not to say it’s completely based on motorbike hard enduro – it just felt like a good way of making myself steer clear of lots of technical slow stuff.”
What did you set out to achieve?
“The feel of a motorbike enduro is what I was after. They just go out and ride anything on their bikes – like, really hard trials lines, through to motocross. Hard enduro just covers so much, from mega-hard trials to fast-paced riding – but it’s just going out and having fun. Covering ground, doing technical stuff, all that gnadgery stuff over the logs – almost like indoor enduro, super-enduro. Just like when I was younger, when I used to emulate moto trials riders, for this, I wanted to emulate hard enduro riders – but with a twist, on my e-bike.”
What was the most fun section for you?
“The opening section over the logs, as I’d never really ridden that before. Riding switch-footed and getting the timing right, it just felt cool. That was good fun. And it’s quite hard to make that look good and smooth.”
And the hardest?
“The last shot, going up all them big rock gardens. That was a really, really hard line. It doesn’t really come across on camera as hard as it was, but everything I do is a legitimate one-liner – I’ve done it legit, not edited bits together. So I’d done that line a lot, trying to get it bottom to top, and I thought I hadn’t got it. And at one point I had to give up, after a long time. The end bit just bit my arse, every time. Then videographer Will said to get a drone shot to mask it, and I was like, ‘I’m not having that!’. So, the rest of the day I was really down on myself, but then we got back, looked at the footage and Will said I’d done it on the second go. I was like, ‘What?!’ He was like, ‘Yeah, you did it, but you didn’t like how it looked!’.”
“The other one is the struggle up the chute – it’s really, really, really hard to get a bike up there, especially one without a motor. That was my best attempt in the video to get that. It’s crazy hard. It was a struggle to get up there. Which is hard enduro. If you stood at the bottom of that, you’d say, ‘You’re not getting an e-bike up there, no way!’. And that’s the challenge.”
Did you plan it to be a raw edit, without music?
“It wasn’t something we set out to do originally; we’d never done a raw edit before. It always felt like a sting in the tail getting the music at the end. It was just to try and mix it up a bit. It’s quite difficult when you’ve made a lot of videos to make something new. You feel like you drop into the same template, with the same vibes, even if you don’t set out to. We really tried to stick to the theme, and the raw thing really seemed to lend itself to it. Just the riding sounds – the motor, the tyre and brake noises. That’s the soundtrack.”
How did you choose the locations?
“I went to watch an enduro event at Parkwood Enduro, which probably started it off, really. That was a catalyst for the hard enduro theme. I really wanted to ride on the terrain and see what I could do. I’d ridden my motorbike trials bike there, but I’ve never raced enduro or taken part in an event. There’s a section in the video that’s a bit of a waterfall and it’s one of the main attractions of the venue. I went there straight away, it was the bit I really wanted to ride, so knowing I could ride that from the start [the venue isn’t normally open to mountain bikers, but Chris was granted special permission ~ ed] was great. It was such good fun.”
Did you have to do any building or prepping of lines?
“I just ride stuff as it lies. I’ve never been one for building stuff. The tombstone steps were probably the only things I put work into – only because the water level in front of it was like a foot deep and it killed your speed riding through it, and I needed speed for this. So, I found a load of flat rocks and laid a crazy-paving path in the water for the run-up to it.”
Are you pleased with how it’s all turned out?
“I actually had quite a lot of fun, keeping momentum – there’s obviously technical stuff in there – but I wanted to keep the riding flowing as much as possible. There’s a lot of hard riding in there, but a lot of run riding, too. As difficult as it is to get across how difficult my stuff is, there’s a good balance of hard technical and good fun lines in there. I’m really pleased with it.”
Just in case you missed our Billy Bolt video, here it is: