Monitor your breathing and fatigue to pace yourself… except when you are fighting to avoid crashing or to get up a hill. Take a moment to look at, or even modify a tricky obstacle. The time and effort to recover from a crash or getting stuck on a hill is far greater than the time pausing at a safe point on the trail. If you do crash or get stopped on a steep hill, pause for a moment and think about the best way to get back going. Speed is not the challenge here, continual progress is the key to this style of riding. Going slow can be faster.
Look ahead where you want to go! Your brain is amazing good at guiding your body to instinctively do the right things when you are looking at where you want to end up, not down at the obstacle right in front of you. You will find your pace is naturally faster too when you do this.
Practice tree hopping if you aren’t already good at it. Hit every tree square of course. To lift your front end, bend your knees, (not your arms) to move your hips forward and compress your front forks a little. Then throw your hips back and pull on the bars while you blip the throttle to loft your tire just enough to hit the top half of the tree. This impact will compress your suspension and set you up to hop/un-weight your bike as you continue or re-blip throttle to bounce over without casing it hard. Here is another good 48 minute riding video for this and other riding techniques.
Monitor your bike like it was an ICU patient to treat it well. Check your oil, air filter, chain and tire pressure every morning as well as spot checking for loose bolts and damage. Before the ride, do some repairs with only your trail tool kit to see how well it works for you.
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