Bacon Race

A good week of preparation with a Tuesday night race and Wednesday group ride, then an extremely lazy Saturday where I took my position on the couch all day, only getting off for a short ride to loosen up the legs.

As it had been raining, I was expecting a mud fest and was not very stoked. Riding in the mud can be fun, but sometimes it gets to a point where you are at risk of doing serious damage to yourself or your bike. But I got to the course and was looking at some of the riders from the earlier start, and they had NO mud on them, and their bikes were clean! So I was pretty excited. I didn't pre-ride the course but it was similar to previous years and BONE DRY (Alchemy? a gap in the Continuum?)

Got a good start, but Brian Robinson pretty much rode away. I was sitting in 3rd with a bit of a gap to the rest of the field, right behind a rider who was pretty strong (but I caught him carrying his bike over a log). I was getting a little sketched out as I was having a hard time seeing roots buried under a layer of dead leaves. So after the previously mentioned log, I saw the rider in front of me hit something but ride away cleanly, and then all of a sudden I was on the ground, and I hit my knee on my bike. I had hit a little hidden stump!

After I crash, I am usually a little ratted, but I started riding better on lap 2. Slipped into 5th, but managed to hold on and take 4th just before the finish. Not a great race, but a good race as it is my best result in Stoney Plain yet. With a couple of races in my legs, my form is a little better than previous years (where I have a history of bonking at this race), but I still haven’t been able to dial in the course. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a real fun course and a well organized race, I just haven’t been able to put together a solid race here!

Good to see Brian finally having a good MTB race, we were bugging him last week about sandbagging. The expert field is really competitive right now; it seems that there is a large group of riders who are all capable of taking a win! I’ll never get to Elite!

Oh yeah. And I would like to take this moment to thank all of my fans. It is amazing how many people I hear cheering for me during the race considering that I am not very talkative!