Tailwind Mountain Bike Race

After receiving several unsuccessful opinions with my wrist, I'm flying out to California next week in hopes of having a second surgery – this one with Dr. Chao who thinks he can help my current situation.  It's taken a solid month to get everything lined up and planned (consult visit on Wednesday and if all goes to plan, surgery on Thursday), but I'm hoping it's all worth it.

So before potentially going under the knife again, I was itching to do something competitive in the small window of time available.  I had talked to Taylor Knapp at Mid-Ohio about a mountain bike race he did and thought it would be cool to do one myself.  I've had a mountain bike since last year which to this point, I've only really ridden on the pavement for cardio workouts.  Taylor had all the info I needed on the series hosting the race, so I contacted them, signed up and was going to give it a shot.  It was a big event with over 200 entries.  I didn't know what to expect, but that seemed like a pretty big turnout.

The race was really cool, but a complete reality check in terms of the difficulty I was expecting.  Up until this point, I would typically go and ride fairly hard for a couple hours, but on mostly smooth terrain.  This race kicked my butt.  I did it with Dan (Cole) who's a fellow racer and has been pedaling a lot as of late.  We joked that we felt like noobs at our first trackday.  Everyone around us knew what was going on and we were just trying to figure out where the start/finish line was.  The race course was a 13 mile mixture of terrain that included a little bit of everything.  Fast sections pedaling flat-out, double trails with rolling hills, big climbs, fast descents, a couple river crossings and the long and almighty single-trail sections.  In my stubborness of doing something I probably shouldn't have, I taped up the wrist, took a bunch of motrin and figured I'd be fine.  Haha.  I had really no experience in these single trails, which had you wizzing by trees, jumping roots, running through banked berms, etc. It was really cool, but damn was it tough!  It definitely required skills to fly through those sections, which as I would find out – I didn't quite yet have.  :) 

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In our class, I would end up finishing 14th out of 22 bikes, with a total time of 1hr, 12min. to finish.  Dan finished 6th and was just seconds outside getting a medal.  It was one hell of a workout.  I was at max-heart rate for 90% of the race it felt like.  I crashed four times which is funny now looking back.  Three of them happened in the single trails.  The last was one of the last big climbs where I couldn't clip-out and just fell over.  I made up time and thought I did well in the most of the sections, but I lost too much time in the single stuff.  I got to the point where my vision got blurry from pushing so hard and that's where I made the mistakes.  Many riders were simply railing through the single trails.  The climbs weren't too terrible – even in the single stuff, as that's where I felt pretty good, everything else through those sections was where I was losing all sorts of time.

Overall, the race was a great time and even though the wrist wasn't happy with me afterwards, I took home several cuts, bruises and lessons learned for next time.  It was certainly physically more demanding than any motorcycle race I've ever done.  I'm ready to try it again and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to convince Dan to do another one as well.

Thanks to Matt for catching the video at the finish line, in what was probably the shortest gear I could find, heading to the finish.