I gotta do better than that.

Last weekend I headed down to Brown County Indiana for a DINO race. I have to be honest, I was a lot of excited about it. This was going to be my first mountain bike race since the mud filled disaster that was the Matson Hill race in St. Louis last year. For reasons unknown to me, I started racing my road bike last year, then sort of stopped racing altogether. Anyway, I have given myself the goal of upgrading to mtb Cat 1 by the end of the summer and was interested to see where I stood in sport after not racing for ages.

The short answer is: Not so good.

Also- Indiana has hills.


I felt like I was riding fairly fast. I never really felt out of my league or uncomfortable. I am fairly certain that I was riding better sunday than I was last year, but its still not good enough. I ended up somewhere in the middle of the field... like 60 out of about 100 in the Cat 2. I guess this is somewhat skewed, since I started with my age wave like 5 minutes back on the first Cat 2 wave... This of course did not stop the 50+ dude that started a minute after me and finished 7th.

The day started well enough. Nick, Dan Eton and Anona and I got to the trail a good hour and fifteen minutes before the race. I like that, I am a huge fan of being able to dick around before my races. I prerode about 2 miles of the 8 mile course and realized that it was absurdly hard dry and fast. This made me very happy that I had decided to throw my maxxis oriflammes in the back of the car before leaving.

These tires are one of my favorites and I love occasions to use them:

They hook up surprisingly well on a wide array of terrain.

The race started up a ~3/4 mile pavement climb- Houffalize style.


I was kind of scared that everyone was in much better shape then me as they went sprinting up the first pitch... Then it seemed that everyone kind of cracked and I began picking people off. I would guess I was 2nd or 3rd in my wave entering the singletrack. Little did I know that this was going to be a theme for the whole race. I would make up ground going uphill and get owned on the downhills. This was quite depressing. I am not strong enough to get enough of a gap on the climbs to make up for my apparently embarrassingly bad decending skills. It is further discouraging in that as nice as our trails at Kickapoo are, there really is no downhill to practice.

As a side note, my fork got sent back to Marzocchi yesterday. Hopefully having working front suspension will give me a touch more confidence. This also means that there will be no mountain biking for me until next weekend when I hit up the Rhetts Run race in Columbia MO. I am still unsure if I am going to ride that race on the singlespeed, or move the fork over...