Monday, October 12, 2009

Who Designed that F'ing Course?

Uh, we did. Oh yeah, I forgot. Having this as our training grounds and riding it so many times was nothing like racing on it with tape and the hoopla that goes along with race day. I would first like to thank my team for their support and all the riders who came out also. All 344 of you. See the south side has something to offer afterall!
We started getting ready the night before by cleaning under the trees, pruning low hanging branches and flagging the areas we knew would be ok for the night. Elvis ended up looking like a bush himself with all the burrs he got attached to his whole body while cleaning up the single track.
We got there at 6:45 in the morning on Sunday and started to set up the course. There were some game day changes to the course which I think now enchanced the course itself. It felt like it took too long to set up, but we were ready at 9:29. The first race started on time at 9:30. If I knew it was OK with the officials to keep both sides of the run up open that's how we would have ran it the whole day instead of just for the 4's races.
So, onto my race. I suck. Nothing like going down twice on the switchback on the hill when that was my bread and butter while training. In all I went down two more times. Actually down one more time, coming around the 360 at the bottom of the run up hill, and a complete dead turn-your-bike-around 180 degrees dead stop at the bottom of the other hill. That was the part of the course we changed. Coming down from the big hill was supposed to go around one tree where you would have to apply your brakes. We made the turn around two trees where you didn't need brakes and could just fly. Well after the two tree turn I didn't lean in enough catching an outside tape post with my handlebars. Now I'm thinking that I must have hit that post almost with the center of my bars because it stopped, and jumped the rear of my bike 180 degrees so I was facing backwards without falling down. It took me a second to figure out that I had to get off my bike just to get back in the right direction on the course.
With all that being said we suck, but hopefully our course didn't.