I love racing my mountain bike...

I am looking forward to the fact that as the summer wears on the mountain bike racing is going to start coming more frequently and overtaken then road races and crits I have been lining up for. Its not that I don't enjoy racing my road bike, I just can't bring myself to really take it seriously. After ~45 minutes its normally over. Often times I finish midpack, and don't even really feel that tired. Oh well. In a mountain bike race, you KNOW you raced. If you do poorly its because your body gave out on you. If you did well it is an amazing feeling. If you did mediocre you still know that you gave it everything you had.

Whatever... I just find it infinitely more rewarding. As much as I sometimes enjoy racing my road bike I always find that I don't really have as much of a competitive desire. Oh well... I guess the moral of what I have written so far is that I like racing mountain bikes more than road bikes.

That said, last Sunday was almost the epitome of what a mountain bike race should be. And lets be clear... up to, and until it started it seemed like it was going to be shit, and a mud fest. We were meant to drive down to southern Indiana earlyish Saturday to preride the course and make a weekend out of the race. Due to rain all of Saturday we waited until the last minuted to make sure that the race was even still going to be on (preriding clearly out of the question at this point).

Armed with a weather forcast that predicted nice weather Sunday and a "hotline" message making no reference to cancellations we headed out in the rain Saturday night to my pre-paid for hotel room.

Sunday morning was still overcast, but luckily not raining. The officials were requesting that people minimize their recon of the trail to keep it in as good of shape as possible. I rode about a mile into it and saw both slick and fast, and a creek crossing with a sloppy/ rocky climb.

If you have spent much time on a mountain bike, you know that there is "shitty muddy" and "fun muddy". Shitty muddy courses have a lot of soupy sticky stuff that makes you constantly feel like you are putting out a ton of watts and not moving. The course is bad enough that you are forced to dismount in places that aren't even that techy. Fun muddy is when it is just muddy enough to make the course kind of slick and slightly more technical than it originally was. Additionally its sloppy but still kinda fast and makes you feel like a kid playing in the dirt.

This course was DEFINITELY the later. To put it in perspective, I am a "Cat 2" mountain biker and was doing 30 minute laps on a ~5.5mile course. 11mph average speed isn't bad for a dry course for me. Actually, I was commenting after the course that without the mud, it might have been kind of boring. The slipperiness added some complexity to what would have normally been a rather fast/ unremarkable trail.

[as a side note, this is kind of my general feeling about the southern IN trails so far. Given the terrain they have to work with I'm confused]

As for the race. The first lap started by my just getting beat out to the single track by a guy that on the start line was complaining about "just getting back from a broken collarbone" and "was going to be really slow". I thought I was third wheel and only one guy was up the trail, I guess I was fourth. This guy was rather slow, and scary sketchy. It was about 5 minutes before he managed to let me (and I think the rest of the field) by. I was happy to look back and realize that I had gapped the rest of my group quickly after... good times. I guess I am getting a bit faster. For the rest of the first lap, I was catching stragglers from previous starts and riding with them for a bit before passing... I think this maybe slowed me down a bit but I didn't want to blow up too early. In the second lap fast guys from starting waves after mine started passing me, and it was a touch confusing to pay attention to who was in my race and who wasn't. I basically kept the same pacing through this lap. Some trouble started when I ran out of water (forgot to grab a fresh bottle after lap 1)... oh well. I was a bit dehydrated/ needing some sugar. I grabbed my bottle with clif shot energy drink (I strongly recommend it, but its not the equal to a gel in terms of energy). Sucking down this, helped my fend off bonking. However, it didn't stop me from noticing a guy in my race passed me and finished 10 seconds (or something) in front of me in the last quarter mile.

Well... 4= no prizes but I do get upgrade points.

Finally, if you are forced to dismount because people in front of you are off their bikes, don't swear at them. It makes you sound like a douche. Particularly if the section you are swearing in 95% of people were dismounting. Extra particularly if you were riding in front of me for 10 minutes or so not letting me pass, and forcing me to dismount like 6 times. I would have made fun of you at the time if there weren't like 10 people watching the race at that point who already were.