On The Pegs October 2019 -Volume 4 - Issue 10 | Page 77

On The Pegs Vol. 4 Issue 10 - October 2019 77 Kailub Russell has dominated GNCC with seven XC1 titles. He’s also wrapped up his second Kenda Full Gas Sprint Enduro title this year, and soon will head to Portugal for his sixth ISDE. We asked him about rac- ing in general and the ISDE in particular fresh after his landmark 60th GNCC victory. Congratulations on your 60th GNCC win. Beyond raw speed, is there a strategy to winning a GNCC race? Yeah, I think so for sure. Maybe not like a full-on strategy and a guide like how to do it, but for me it always seems that there has been and how I kind of figure out the track and attack it. It’s a long topic to get into. Can you give me one aspect of it? Is there a pacing that you do to conserve your energy for when you need it? Yeah. Some races there is, and some there isn’t. It just depends really on how everything develops and where the guys are on the track that I normally have to battle with, or even how I feel… When you’re really feeling and straightaway you get into the track and you feel really good, I try to go and see if I can get away from those guys. If that happens, then I kind of keep the hammer down the whole race. When you can’t, like a race like this past weekend [at the Black Sky GNCC] where the track is really technical and just slick and no traction and there’s lines everywhere, you just kind of piece it together and figure out where you’re good and where you’re not so good and try to work on those couple sections and find some lines that are a little bit smoother. Like I said, there’s a whole other conversa- tion that would take really long to try to describe the situation that I would men- tally use. Are you wearing a heart rate monitor that you look at during the race or that you study after the race? I don’t really look at it during the race because you can’t really control your heart rate. You can in a way, but you can’t on a dirt bike. I’ve noticed just in training in general, once you get on the dirt bike it’s always way higher than when you’re on a bicycle. On a bicycle you can kind of control where you want to be at and ev- erything, but on the dirt bike with adrenaline and just how physical it is, you can’t really control your heart rate unless you just completely slow down and stop try-