Almost 15 years on, and Enduro is a very inclusive race format, ever increasing in popularity having now spread to almost every nation on the planet which has a mountain biking scene. Ask any mountain biker from almost any country what Enduro is and they’ll be able to give you a straight, correct answer. I said *almost* any country.
How to confuse people
In the early noughties as mountain biking started to go decidedly mainstream, a raft of not-too-serious, not-too-competive fairly social mountain biking events sprung up around UK. They were often untimed, often without official ranking, but (in order to make a day of it) were set to either a number of quite long laps or a one-off loop resulting in a total distance of at least 50km, usually more than that if you were doing the full monty.
This was a for-fun or for-personal-achievement version of marathon cross-country racing. A great idea which, in practice, has produced some very popular gatherings, but the organisers had committed one glaring crime: they had called these rides “Enduro”. Do some digging and you’ll see their claim that at the time they started out, no other event used the term “Enduro”. My news for them is that mountain biking is a sport not limited to UK shores.
Unfortunately they were copied by others, presumably because “Enduro” was deemed to be a cool-sounding term. Hence, even though the overwhelming majority of mountain bikers worldwide when asked what Enduro is would give you the correct answer in a straight manner, the average rider from the UK when asked the same question would give one of three reactions: the right one, the wrong one, or a question back: “which Enduro?”
Why it matters
Should we care? It’s only a name, right?
The reason I, as an advocate of Enduro, care a great deal is because the relatively widespread purporting of non-Enduro events as being Enduro (MTB internet forum chat being an inadvertent but undeniable perpetuator) has resulted in a huge roadblock in understanding; a monumental impediment in the conceptual development of mountain biking competition in the UK. You think I’m going over the top? Why then is it that the ONLY country that has “Enduros” which aren’t actually Enduros, is also the LAST country (of any mountain biking significance) to cotton on, and receive an Enduro series? There is an absolutely direct and undeniable cause-and-effect link going on here.
And, as much as I absolutely commend Steve Parr and his helpers for having had the fortitude to finally bring the first Enduro series to the UK in 2011 and for the frustrations that they must have endured getting the message through to people (for example, the fact that they were essentially forced to put “Gravity” in front of Enduro is nothing short of a joke), they’re not even the ones I feel sorry for. No, I pity the greater mountain biking population who, as a direct result of mistakenly thinking they already had Enduro, did not as a nation receive this fantastic competition format until many many years after they should have done.
With two proper series plus a peppering of trail centre-based one-off events now installed for 2012, it seems that good sense is well and truly starting to prevail in favour of Enduro in the UK.
However, there is still a way to go before the wider MTB public fully appreciate the raison d’être of Enduro and can benefit from it fully. With this in mind, and with the aim of increasing understanding by firstly decreasing confusion, I would be delighted if someone could persuade the organisers of non-Enduro “Enduros” that they might, once and for all, remove “Enduro” from their events’ titles and call them literally anything else.
