A fairly uneventful race at Mt Snow this past Sunday. The most eventful thing was a Vermont statie bagging me on the way up. Note: do not speed in Vermont! I was only speeding because I had missed the exit off of 91, and had to double back...shit. There goes my perfect driving record.
Anyway, it was a rather disappointing turnout (see picture), I guess all those people that said they were going to boycott this, the third race at Mt Snow, weren't kidding. Well it sucks to be them, because the conditions were perfect. No mud. Yes, that's right, I said no mud - at Mount Snow. In fact it was downright dusty.
Hopefully this will be my final race as a Cat 2, as I'm pretty sure USAC will approve my upgrade to 1 next season, but alas, the field wasn't very deep for this race; total of maybe 20 Cat 2's?
The number one thing about this race that will stick out in my head was how...eerie it was. The weather was perfect, but there was just that sense in the back of my head, that I won't be here again for a while, and that the season is - except for Fort Rock next week - basically over. It was eerie because, other than the few Cat 2 racers (the Cat 1 race was earlier in the day and they had since cleared out), the place was a ghost town. Last time I was at Mt Snow it was Nationals complete with the festival atmosphere, and that's how I remembered it. I was expecting a much bigger crowd, considering the epic turnout of Landmine last week.
The ghost-town-ness of the venue and the course made for a rather lonely race. From the gun I took off and was shocked...5 seconds into the race and every one was well behind me and except for one fellow sandbagger who took right off up the hill and was never seen again - in the end he beat me by about 2 min, giving me second place. Speaking of sandbagging, the cat 2 guys didn't take kindly to me asking if we could do 3 laps at the start line...only 2? I know, it's a tough course, but c'mon - I drove three hours here! At any rate, I was by myself 90% of the race, except for the near end of the first lap where a guy passed me like I was standing still on a really rough downhill section, then we rode together through the lap point, and I slowly put a gap into him going back up on the second lap. Once at the top, I could not see him, and hopped I had put enough time between us on the climb, as he was obviously a better descender ( and it didn't hurt he was riding a Ellsworth Truth, what is that, a 5" of travel?) Luckily I did put enough time into him, as despite my sucky descending, I finished about two min ahead of him.
The course was pretty damn good, I gotta say. The downhills were very challenging, I need practice at extreme downhilling like that, as we don't really have anything remotely similar in this neck of the woods. I felt pretty strong on the climb, but man, is it brutal. All that fire road at ~20% grade in spots is demoralizing to say the least. I definitely could have done a third lap, and I feel like it would have been faster than the previous two just from having a better idea of the lines on the downhill. Oh well, so it goes.
Fort Rock next week, and then the fat lady sings for the '09 MTB race season..
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