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Written by Adam Craig
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Tuesday, 13 June 2006 |
 Southeast. Nice area. Spent some quality time there over the years, mostly escaping frigid Maine winters for a few weeks... It always seemed like there were a ton of bike riders around the region and that it'd be a good place for a national series race. Turns out it is. Sugar Mountain, just outside the towns of Banner Elk and Boone in the Highlands region of northwest North Carolina, played host to the second round of the NMBS for the first time this weekend. Usually first time events are a little sparse on attendance but the southeast held true to it's bike racing roots and a bunch of people turned out to race and check things out. I hear it's back on for next year so it should be even better.
Friday is a pretty key day for the national series racer, you've gotta do recon on various courses, finalize your setup and get your body fired up for the weekend of racing. Carl and I both tried new methods of achieving this in NC. I, instead of sleeping in and riding for a few hours whenever I got to it, got up early(ish), made some huevos and headed to the venue to sort tired and get a ride in. This worked out perfectly, after I crashed hard on my second XC lap I had plenty of time to limp around and lay in bed with the worst charlie horse/hematoma on my thigh I've had in recent memory. Couldn't walk right till Monday... As I limped in Carl was just leaving after a morning/early afternoon of sleep and reading. He asked what tires to run, did a double take and asked where he should walk his bike on the descent to avoid eating it and limping like me... I passed on the location of the half cut off stump that caused my ejection... Carl arrived at the race course just in time for the semi pros to start and therefore was forced to simply ride straight up the ski run to the top of the downhill, proving that, indeed, it didn't need to take the course 30 minutes to reach the top of the five minute descent each lap. But take thirty minutes it did on race day due to them looping around the mountain in some type of time/space/gravity/altitude continuum...
Turns out on race day niether of our preperations were optimal... I couldn't really stand up and pedal, or walk for that matter, but seated pedalling was Ok. Carl definately didn't identify the spot that bit me, so we closed his eyes and pretended every foot of trail could catapult him to his death. Combined with terrible legs from a week of road racing in at Mount Hood last week he bagged it after two laps, all smiles for me as I headed up the steepest climb known to man for the fourth time with Ross Schnell hot on my heels, engaged in an epic battle (amongst friends?) for sixth place, the leaders long gone due to my inablity to accelerate. I totally held him off.
Too bad Ross crashed in our morning Super D battle and still beat me by ten seconds, as I rode like a small child who didn't know how to walk, relax or pick lines for a 6" travel bike. He still got beat by Kirkaldie though, albiet only by a few seconds... After the fact, during the XC, I learned all the clever lines those guys learned by practicing super D on friday afternoon instead of lying in bed moaning or sitting in a cold stream trying to stop the swelling... That's OK though, I'm trying race as many supa D's as I can for my own entertainment and to lend some credibility to the discipline. I pretty much just want to beat Ross too... Sucks that he's so fast...
Short Track was average, Carl and I were working on our team tactics and battle formation, unfortunately, it was to drop tenth place back in our battle for eigth and ninth positions. We could totally see the front of the race though, and we totally dropped tenth place back through our imressive use of formation flying (by that I mean riding around three seconds apart working really hard for no reason...). Next weekend when there isn't a huge hill that I couldn't sprint up we'll be totally set up though...
Thanks for reading about the battering we took in the south. Can't wait for my beloved Mount Snow and Saint Anne to turn things around.
Adam and Carl's open minded, alternative thinking Giant Team. |
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