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Beaver Meadows MTB Race |
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Team Bikeman -
Race Reports
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Written by T. Merk-Wynne
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Sunday, 08 October 2006 |
Beaver Meadows MTB Race
Red Feather, CO
We thought it would be a good idea to drive to the middle of nowhere Colorado at 9 pm Saturday night for a 9 am race Sunday so the Colorado College team packed up a couple cars holding the entire whopping 8 rider team and headed north. We crashed at a friend’s apartment at about midnight and were rudely awoken 5 hours later to prepare breakfast and coffee.
The legs had been feeling pretty good lately but 5 hours of sleep didn’t sound like a good start to a successful race. Considering that we were still one hour from the race I figured I would grab some breakfast and then some more sleep on the way but that was before the coffee hit.
This stuff was like nothing I’ve ever had before. I think it should be illegal. It’s called ‘Superfly TNT’ for a reason. Apparently this stuff is pretty famous and hard to get. As far as I know you can only get it from this one coffee shop in New Zealand. Luckily Colin Cares (U23 National MTB team) is now a freshman at Colorado College and recently was in New Zealand for World’s. He and the rest of the U23 team apparently bought every last bean in the shop and are saving it for special occasions so I was grateful he was racing this weekend and in a sharing mood because I think we all needed it.
Anyhow, we got to the race site and stepped out of the car into 30 degree weather, but beautiful skies. The race started about 45 minutes late because the EMT's never showed and they had to call the volunteer fire department. I started in the back because there were a ton of fast guys there and I wanted to start slow considering we had 30 miles of terrain to cover. The course was pretty fun. Rolling and really rough for 90%, definitely a full suspension course but I was on a hard tail. I was last wheel, about 35th place, going into the singletrack but was feeling alright and moved up to top 20th by the end of first lap. I was latched onto a group of five guys that were around places 13-17 but threw my chain a couple times and they got a gap and left me. The next group caught me shortly after and I rode with them until I flatted. I had a decent change and caught the group again by the end of lap 2. Things were spread out by lap three and I continued riding steady but not all out and was catching guys fading at the end to finish 15th or 16th overall, but I don’t know how I finished in collegiate or DII collegiate because results weren’t posted at the race and still aren’t up on the net either. Not a bad race considering sleep and mechanical issues and not killing myself. I think the race took me somewhere around 3 hours which is one of the longest mountain bike races I’ve ever done. Colorado College had two other guys in A’s and one was few minutes ahead of me in 12th or so. The other, Colin, finished in 2.5hrs or probably less and took the win by 6 or 7 minutes.
Taylor
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