The Adventures of Sola: Wet and Wild Weekend of Racing

It has not rained substantially in quite some time but the weather decided to unleash this past weekend. Up first was the Northern California Championships. The event? Super D. The La Grange Classic is an xc course I started racing back when I was a junior. Over the years the race has slowly grown to include an endurance event, downhill, and Super D. The Super D course is 8.4 miles and starts off with a steep rocky sketchy downhill. From there it heads deeper into the woods where a plethora of singletrack awaits. It's a lung burner and the fastest time for this course is around 26 minutes.

Bear and I headed up (Nick went too but drove himself) and were watching the weather. It wasn't raining on the drive up or when we were loading up in the shuttle to head to the top. I had plate #1 (only because I registered first) and was cued to go. As the countdown began the skies opened up and the rain hammered the ground. The rain and mud quickly impaired vision through the glasses and almost prompted me to take them off...but I figured that it would be quite muddy on the lower section and I didn't feel like having dirt scrubbing my eyes. The course became slick and I started blowing turns. As I progressed down the course the roots, rocks, and corners were either traction galore or super slick. Entering into a steep left hander I got my two wheel drift on (not on purpose) and even though I wanted to go left, the bike was heading right...towards a tree. I locked it up and did my best to avoid the tree. Mission accomplished but I was stopped. Got going again and rode hard towards the finish. There were a lot of wood bridges that had me slow down in hopes of not slipping off and shooting off the trail. Finally rolled through the finish gasping for air. It would be a while before I knew how I ended up. Not a clean run but I made it down without any crashes.

Bear finished and we spun the legs out. After all the racers finished we all had a similar run. Missed turns, close calls, but at least no crashes. Nick won the junior race by a huge 10 minute margin. Bear finished third in the 30-39 and I finished 1st in 30-39. We changed out of our wet clothes and headed out in search of food.

Hardware for the day

Post race milkshake

Post race milkshake toast

The second part of the weekend had me scrambling to finish up another phase in a design project. I had been scrambling all week to get things finished before the races but was cutting it close. We were planning to leave at noon and I finished up at 11:45am. Whew. Stressful indeed. We headed down South to Marja's. When we got there we spent some time changing a headlight in her Prius. Needless to say it was way more involved than it needed to be. Wonder why companies to make parts that are easy to change. Anyways, if you need some tips on changing your own Prius headlight let me know because we have some now that don't require angry hammering.

Brad came over and took us out for burgers near R15. We hung out and shot the breeze for a while as well as hitting up REI and Best Buy for some browsing. Tomorrow Bear and I would two man team relay the TBF 50 mile mountain bike race.

The next morning Brad and Marja made some super delicious oatmeal pancakes. The weather was fairly decent just sprinkling. The forecast called for 60% chance of rain. When we got to the race venue it was dumping. We registered and I was soaked even before I finished getting dressed. I was running behind and got to the line. I kept getting in the wrong wave because they changed them from the initial posting. There were about 120 starters which seemed pretty good since the weather was horrible. The solo racers started first and our group started after all the solo waves which was four minutes later.

Here I am wondering if I'm in the right starting wave

Finally our race started. Our plan was that I would do the first two laps and Bear the last two laps of the race. With the weather being cold and rainy I figured that if we switched off every lap it would be difficult to stay warm. I rode in second and the guy in 1st was pinning it. I sat in just to see what would happen. We started getting into the solo fields and I took the lead and wanted to get past as many solo riders as possible to get Bear into good position. It was tough to pin in past racers in the singletrack and then have to slow to a crawl and get stuck behind 4-5 racers and then attempt to pass them when I could. On a steep rocky climb a racer picked a line to the right and I went left. Before I knew it he came back left and took out my front wheel smashing me onto the rocks. Got back up and kept pedaling. I burned some matches passing as many as I could and it finally thinned out near the end of the lap and we were already into the top 10 overall.

There were some long flat sections of the course that put the hurt on me. I lost a lot of time there because I was alone and there was a group of three racers working together behind me. Second place team caught up with me on the flats and attacked when I took a sip of water. He took the lead into the second lap and his teammate went out while I continued and got a water hand up from Bear. I had to slow up and was easily dropped. There was something stuck in my rear disc caliper that made a horrible sound but I kept going. I held on and kept picking off solo riders but felt disappointed that I couldn't hold the wheel of the other team. Things were quite spread out by this time and the other team went up by five minutes half way through the race. I came in and Bear headed out for the final two laps of the race.

What happened next was sheer awesomeness on my good friend and teammates part. Bear rode his way back up into contention and then duked it out on the final lap with the other team. After repeated attacks he got away and led us to the overall win and the win in the team competition! The other team was not friendly at all (even before the race) but we found out we were in different age groups so they won their race as well. In our category we finished 9 minutes ahead of 2nd place. Our teammate Chris also finished 2nd in the solo division.