Two race recap (some up and some down)

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I have been meaning to post for a couple of weeks and life obligations have really gotten in the way of that. I cannot crank out the blog posts the way some people can.  I guess that is the engineer brain that I have.

On August 5 I did the Hodges Village Dam MTB race.  I really like this course.  It has a nice blend of technical singletrack and wide open drag race sections.  It does not have a lot of climbing though.  This hurts me as that also means there is no downhill to rest on.  I also tend to be pretty good at the technical downhills.  The day was pretty hot and (as all the courses seem to be this year) very dusty.  The 40-49 group took off fairly quickly.  I started with a more reserved pace in order not to blow up in the first 30 min.  As the race progressed I picked off a few others in my race.  It was definitely a race of attrition as the temps and humidity were high.  I had success at the Wilderness 101 with using a Camelbak again so I figured that I would do it here also.  This really helped as I could take the water in the feedzone and dump it on my head to cool me down.  Without that the race would have been miserable.  I ended up finishing 8 min. faster than the last time the race had similar conditions.  I was happy to see this and the 12th place finish because the Wilderness 101 was only a week before and I am sure that I was not recovered completely.

Thanks to my Seven Sola SL 29 the technical sections flowed really well.  I can’t say enough about how nice this bike rides.  It climbs well and handles the singletrack extremely well.  I don’t miss full suspension at all.

The Treasure Valley Rally on August 26 was quite a different story.  I have been battling a cold for over two weeks now.  My guess is that was partly due to a suppressed immune system after the Wilderness 101 and then the Hodges Race and also partly due to not sleeping enough due to my daughter’s molars coming in causing spotty sleep.  As I usually do, I could not look back at that.  There was nothing I could do now.  I had preregged for the race so I figured that I would give it a go.  An additional dray was that there was a kid’s race for Lars.  He REALLY looks forward to these (more on that later).

We lined up with the 30-39 group also so it was a pretty big group.  Unfortunately, there was a good sized crash a few yards off the start.  I stayed up but did get hung up by it but wasn’t really concerned as I was not feeling great and didn’t want to slow anyone else down.  The course followed dirt roads for a decent stretch to help string things out.  As we got into the technical single track I started picking people off.  At this point I am thinking “OK I can do this” and then I got to the climbs.  As I tried to recover after the climbs I started coughing pretty good.  Bummer.  I had to slow to stop the coughing.  I kept it up though and was liking the really technical single track.  It was almost unridable :).

Somewhere around mile 7 I was in the groove going down a hill and suddenly there were a few guys running up the hill toward me without their bikes. Huh?  They warned me to stop as there was a swarm of ground bees, a really big swarm.  One person was stung at least 10 times!  I stopped to figure out how to get around it.  Now there were several other people standing around figuring out what to do.  We decided to go down the hill and bushwhack around the bees.  That worked out pretty well as we got out to the trail pretty quickly or so we though.  It turned out that we were part way into the lap and headed around again.  I had started to recognize some of the course and a couple of guys that passed me were racers that had pulled away from me an hour before.  At this point between coughing and the course and bee issues I decided to turn back and just ride the start.  I still got in 1.5 hours of racing but unfortunately didn’t finish.  At first I was pretty bummed.  As I processed the crazy events and also being sick I accepted it and am looking forward to a couple more MTB races with NEMBA Racing and then a full cyclocross season.

The other NEMBA Racing team members had a mix of success including a few top tens.  Check out racing.nemba.org to see the race recaps.