After having Drew take a quick look at my new I-9 wheels that I have been riding the hell out of, I thought I was ready to go. It was a fast start and a tight trail. Once I caught up with super fast bad ass - Christine Putnam - I tried hard to stay on her wheel, which wasn't very easy... It felt like a painful nauseating XC race and then things just suddenly weren't right - my rear derailleur broke. Not too sure why yet.. I think I might have gotten into trouble again from doing too much work on my bike too soon before a race. But riding in the mud and rain had done a lot of damage to my bike in the weeks before. And I'm finding that I can't really keep up with how often I need to change my chain these days.. guess I might need to start thinking about single speeding a little bit more. ugh. Well anyway.. My rear der. broke, I walked out, borrowed a Gary Fisher Big Sur from my friend Charlie (THANKS CHARLIE!), road back to where I had departed the route, and completed the first lap.Mom took off and returned about an hr and 20ish later.. meanwhile the super cool folks at Magic Cycles offered up an xtr rear der for me to borrow... um.. well ok! Totally worried I was about to brake a stupidly expensive derailleur, I road carefully as I started my second lap. Instantly my shifting got all funky.. so I began to ride without putting too much pressure on things.. which was tough on this course. Tight, twisty, lots of quick ups and downs that required either power or fast shifting, neither thing I could do without stressing my derailleur of course. And then before I knew it my chain broke. Without a tool on me, I figured I'd just walk out and give it up. But then a nice Single Speeder who seemed pretty happy just chillin for a few min lent me his chain tool. With no need to rush, I fixed my chain, had a nice chat and was back on my way. My shifting greatly improved and I picked up speed. As I approached the "technical rock garden", I got pretty excited as now I could hit it with my big wheels (which I was missing the first time around on the borrowed GF.) Taking a bad line, I recovered just as a dagger of a rock sliced my side wall. NOOOOOO.. Stans spewed everywhere.. deep breath. Ok. Pulled out my tube, borrowed a pump from a passing rider, pumped it up and then the friggin core of the valve stem came out. Ok. Done. Defeated, I walked out and mom and I gave it up. We were happy that neither of us became so injured that we would f-up our up and coming trip to Fruita and Moab together...
The picture to the right is Charles of Mock Orange Bikes in Winston-Salem... I really like this
picture, kinetic images took some rad shots of the twisty-ness of the race.. you should check 'em out.I would totally do this race again - Tough and interesting course, Good people, Awesome food and beer at the end, Overall very well run. They even had super cool nice'n'soft t-shirts. Lots of great people showed up and rode hard and didn't have tons of mechanicals.
Now I'm heading west to bigger sky's and bigger rocks and a week of mountain biking with my mom. If you are out there and want to ride drop me a line.. I'll be riding in Fruita 13th and 14th then Moab from the 15th to the 19th.. or something like that
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