Saturday Afternoon Romp

The Stats:

• 10.8 miles
• 1650' of climbing
• 1st-Place Singlespeed, 3rd-Place Expert Men
• 51:33 to the finish
• # of Wrecks:  I once again managed to keep my bicycle upright throughout.

Having just spent the week working in Salt Lake City, I decided to skip the dreary weather at home and last-minute-enter the Utah State Championship Series XC race in Alpine on Saturday.  Then I woke up Saturday morning to dreary rain--oh well.  The singlespeed wave wasn't scheduled to go off until 1pm and it had to dry out by then, right?

It actually was nicer--partly sunny--as I drove south through American Fork and found the venue on a sage- and scrub oak-covered hillside at the base of the big mountains.  (Southern Wasatch?)  The morning's deluge had left the course soggy, so our start times were bumped back 90 minutes to allow for a bit of drying.  Perfect for letting me digest the huge brunch I had just consumed with Mary and Nils, and a nice opportunity to take a brief nap in the warm truck.

Race organizer Bob Saffell's bike after re-marking the course.  Yup, it's soggy out there.
Photo: MTBRace Productions

It also gave me time to do a couple of warm-up laps on the course. We were supposed to race 4 laps on a 3.4-mile loop but the soggy weather had forced removal of a fair bit of climbing and an amazing descent, dropping the lap distance to 2.7 miles.  So it made sense to warm up on the course and get to know it before hitting it full-tilt.  Turns out that a 45-minute warm-up was just about right--I hit the line feeling loose and ready.

I typically choose to starting slow and gradually work into my race pace (metaphor for life?), but with this being more of a sprint I wanted to try a different approach.  My plan, given that I rarely go out for these hot-and-fast type races and I already had my heartrate up, was to get off the line at full-speed and try to enter the twisty singletrack in the lead.  I had no idea if it would work, but why not give it a try?  Turns out that I wasn't the only one with that plan, and that Alex Smith had pre-loaded his quads with lightning and was almost out of view by the time I got my feet clipped into my pedals.

So I spent the remainder of the race trying to close the gap between us.  Shannon Boffelli and I got stuck behind a couple of slower riders in a tight, hard-to-pass section of singletrack midway through the first lap, which allowed Alex to open up a bigger lead, and when we rolled through basecamp to head out on Lap 2 we heard that Alex was 55 seconds up.  Crap.

So I picked it up on the climb out of basecamp and was 30 seconds back at the end of lap 3.  Then starting into Lap 4 I could see Alex about 35 yards up and started to feel a shred of hope.  By this point I had recognized that I was making time on the climbs and losing it on the twisty descents.  In reality, I'm not in technical racing form--too early in the season for me to have spent any significant time on dirt.  So I mashed as hard as my quads would support on the ups and did my best to stay off the brakes on the downs.  I kept catching glimpses of Alex's white jersey through the scrub oak but didn't really get close enough to feel optimistic until the bottom of the lap heading into the climbing back up to the finish, with about 1/2-mile left.

I finally made contact when we came out of the woods onto the 200-yard pavement climb to the end, and we sprinted it out right through the line.  Alex is damn strong; I just had a touch more juice left in my legs and was able to squeak it out by 2 seconds.  Definitely the day's most exciting finish according to the finish line spectators.

It felt great to go that hard--we don't really do that in the 100-milers.  The LES and AC wheels performed beautifully once again, and the new Endless Bikes cogs are proving to be freaking awesome.  Now I just need to remind myself how to charge the downhills.

Damn, mountain biking is fun.

*Sorry about the lack of images--I was there solo and my camera batteries were dead.  Lame.