MTB
Digging Deep: Kate Courtney
In her own words, pro mountain biker Kate Courtney describes how she learned to confront her fears and demystify obstacles by working with veteran rider Jill Kintner.
I feel an odd sense of calm as I peer over the edge of the rock, down toward the steep ribbon of dirt that would serve as a landing over 6 feet below.
Closing my eyes, I visualize myself riding off it. Heels down, eyes up, weight centered. I know what I need to do. Yet a part of me still wonders if I will be able to do it when it counts. Before I can let the doubt creep in, I hear Jill’s matter-of-fact voice shouting up at me. “If you think you can do it, just do it,” she says. Jill doesn’t buy into the drama for even a moment; doesn’t let her imagination fixate on what could go wrong.
For her, the calculation is simple. If you know how to do it, then do it. The confidence in her voice stirs something in me, pulling me back into the moment. I am reminded that this challenge is one I am prepared for. I take a deep breath and turn toward my bike, anxious anticipation now morphing into deep resolve. I don’t hesitate. I clip my feet into the pedals, steady my hands on the handlebars and go.
After graduating from Stanford in 2017, Courtney began racing full-time.
© NICK MUZIK
It is the second day of my most recent skills camp working with Jill Kintner in Bellingham, Washington. Both the town and Jill herself are famous for mountain biking: Bellingham for its endless singletrack filled with well-built features and infinite opportunities to progress. And Jill for being a world champion, Olympian and all-around badass who has excelled in everything from downhill to BMX racing. For more than two decades, Jill has been a mainstay on the top step of the podium and a threat in any event she enters on the gravity side of the sport.
Jill also happens to be a fellow pro rider with Red Bull, which is how I first met her at a retreat in Texas in 2017. Like on many Red Bull retreats, we found ourselves immersed in a world that seemed almost unbelievable: a quick surf in an artificial wave pool before a helicopter dropped us at a pop-up camp village on Willie Nelson’s ranch.
Jill and I settled into adjacent trailers and, though it was a bike-free weekend, we found ourselves bonding over our shared awe at where cycling had taken us. Though Jill was a veteran and I was new to the scene, there was a synergy in our shared obsession with pursuing our best through the bike. And as I got to know her, I came to appreciate who Jill is as a person as much as I have always appreciated what she does as an athlete. On the surface, Jill comes off as somewhat shy. She has a quiet voice and a silly sense of humor that endears her to anyone she meets. But as soon as a competitive task is introduced or the topic of racing comes up, Jill has a quiet ferocity and intensity that is unmatched. I love this about her. She is a perfectionist in the most beautiful way—always striving to get closer to that perfect turn, to flawlessly hitting the landing of a jump or building speed with just the right timing through the pump track. Jill doesn’t just have a relentless drive for mastery; she has a creativity and dedication to the process that actually gets her there.
Courtney and Kintner work together on mental and physical strategies.
© BRYN ATKINSON
So when I found myself struggling on the World Cup circuit in 2021, I knew exactly who to call. That year was one of the toughest in my career. For many years as a developing racer, things had only gone in one direction—up. I made quick progress through the junior ranks, built steadily as an Under-23 competitor and won the world championship in my first year as an Elite. The next year, I backed it up with World Cup wins, a World Cup overall title and an automatic qualification for the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
But at the start of 2020, things shifted rapidly. In a pandemic year with no racing in the U.S., I dropped from first to 77th in the UCI’s world ranking. Organizers pushed back the timing of our races six weeks at a time, which meant that the training never stopped. And I found myself pushing harder and harder to hold on to the fitness that I had built in the spring. By the time the Olympics at last arrived, a year later in 2021, I felt burned out mentally and overtrained physically. A poor performance in Tokyo only made things worse, and I struggled to even finish the World Cup season.
As I started to recover in the fall, it was time to take a hard look at every element of my game and begin to rebuild. When it came to technical skills, for example, I had the feeling I was missing something.
Bellingham and Jill herself are both famous for mountain biking.
© BRYN ATKINSON
Over the years, I had worked with a few different skills coaches—mostly men who had competed on the downhill World Cup circuit. Early on, I made quick progress and must give huge credit to Shaums March, a former master’s world champion, for getting me safely around the courses at Junior World Cups. But as I began to progress, skills camps started to feel like a test of my courage more than a progression of my skill.
Was the difference between a big jump and a small jump just in my willingness to send it? Maybe the men who were jumping higher and throwing whips effortlessly were just being braver. Fear appeared to be the main obstacle to my progress. So I focused on overcoming it. The “just send it” and “speed is your friend” mentality at least got me to try features for the first time, but as the stakes got higher and the features got bigger, I felt like my skills remained the same.
Even if I could ride something, I could tell my body position wasn’t quite right or that my timing felt a little off. I envied the Swiss riders, who had attended basic skills camps from a young age and seemed to have internalized perfect form. I had learned on the fly and under big pressure to hit features at World Cup events. It felt like I had somehow progressed by sheer willpower alone and with little technique. I remember watching a younger rider at the world championships in Les Gets, France, effortlessly send a big gap jump while I barely made it to the other side without crashing. More speed helped and I was able to ride it in the race—but I knew if the jump had been any bigger, I would have been in trouble. As the features grew bigger and the competition tighter, it was clear I was beginning to reach the limit of where persistence alone could take me.
My strength coach, Matt Smith, introduced me to a concept that I feel captured the feeling perfectly. He called it the “fallacy of deep water.” The idea is that when you wade into the ocean and begin to swim, you start out in shallow water. You can see the bottom and you have no doubt that you will be able to stay afloat. Yet there comes a moment, as you swim farther from shore, that you realize that you are in very deep water. Fear or panic often sets in as you recognize how far you’ve come from shore and start to reckon with the groundlessness below you. In this moment, you can start to doubt your ability to keep yourself afloat. The fallacy of deep water is that, though your mind might tell you otherwise, the task of swimming remains the same and all that really matters is your ability to execute that skill.
As for my skills work, it felt like I had found myself in very deep water, feeling a little shaky about keeping myself afloat and certainly not eager to venture out any farther. I knew I needed to relearn the basics—and to know without a doubt that I had the ability to meet all the challenges that were sitting in front of me.
Courtney has worked to rethink how she approaches technical challenges.
© BARTOSZ WOLINSKI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
That’s when I reached out to Jill.
The first time we rode together—in Santa Cruz, California, late in the fall of 2021—I instantly felt that this experience would be different. It was the first time I’d observed Jill’s meticulous approach to building skills up close. She keeps notes on every subtle change in bike setup, has charts lining her garage with the skills she’d like to master or improve and generally runs a very tight ship on and off the bike. When you train with Jill, it’s not just about getting something right. It’s about getting it perfect. Then doing it three times before you can move on.
When we first started working together, Jill put me on flat pedals and set up obstacles in a parking lot. I spent most of our sessions navigating cones and hopping over sticks before eventually moving on to the pump track. After every task,Jill showed me videos of my body position and demonstrated what the skill should look like when done correctly.
Those first few days would have looked very boring from the outside—no cool tricks or jumps or drops. I never felt even the slightest bit of fear. Yet I was as challenged and focused as I had ever been on my bike. My mind worked overtime to understand the mechanics of each skill and my body adapted to new ways of moving and approaching new features. I could instantly feel how tiny changes in body position or timing made a huge difference. And Jill continued to help me unlock new opportunities to improve. It was exactly what I had been looking for—and I found myself obsessed with how to make progress in this new paradigm.
Over the past two years, Jill has helped me progress from hopping over sticks in the parking lot to confidently navigating some of the biggest features and most technical terrain I’ve ever ridden. Muddy and slick roots and rocks became less intimidating as I learned to pick better lines and keep my body weight in the right position. I went from hitting the smallest jumps on the green line to clearing the gaps on the black line at the bike park, landing centered and in control.
With Jill’s meticulous process, I have built new skills, piece by piece, step by step, replacing fear with confidence in my ability to tackle new obstacles. And as we pushed the limits of drops and jumps on our last camp together, I found that I simply was no longer afraid of the same obstacles that had kept me up at night a few years ago. With Jill, fear wasn’t the obstacle. The obstacle was the obstacle. Our focus was on building the skills necessary to approach it with confidence.
Courtney is no longer worried of being pushed out of her comfort zone.
© BARTOSZ WOLINSKI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
Back atop that intimidating rock feature in Bellingham, I let go of the brakes and descend toward the drop. I am reminded of the fallacy of deep water. Jill has shown me that the water can become infinitely deeper, but all that really matters is whether you know how to swim. When I saw the feature for the first time, I felt afraid. Fear let me know that I was in deep water—that the stakes were high and that I needed to pay attention.
Yet as my wheels begin to turn, I am too consumed by the moment to be afraid—too focused on keeping those feet down and those eyes up. I know how to keep myself afloat. In an instant, I take off calmly and land gently at the bottom, enjoying the satisfying feeling of stretching myself just a bit further than I have before.
As a World Cup racer who makes a living pushing my mind and body to the edge, I know what it feels like to find myself in deep water. I go there often and I am usually alone. But in this moment, I turn and see a big smile on Jill’s face.
“See, told ya!” she shouts through a grin. “It didn’t even look hard!”
I smile up at her and feel proud. And even as I sit in the silent relief of the moment, a quiet curiosity seems to bubble up in me—could I go bigger?
I am grateful for the deep water, for the chance to challenge myself and change myself in the process. And I am grateful for Jill—who reminds me again and again that I know how to swim.
