CCCX Downhill - by Erik Trauschke

Ok, so here's my version of yesterday:
I had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning even though I went
to bed early. However, I drove to Scott's place to meet with the others
and catch the van. And surprisingly enough, we left almost on time, even
though Scott was part of the group ;)

In Toro park we met Rich and Rafael and a bunch of other guys. Everybody
was trying to get going as fast as possible to get registered for a good
start time (which actually didn't mean much) and to get enough practice
runs in. I realized that I had forgotten my shoes but luckily Rich had
some old spares. I registered for the Hardtail class, since I'm still
waiting for my "real" bike.
I did my practice runs together with Scott so we both started climbing
up at about 10:00. The weather was really nice and we actually got
pretty warm climbing up to the start. I left Scott going ahead of me and
started immediately after him to try to keep his wheel. The first part
was all medium steep fireroad with a few rollers where you couldn't see
what was behind the top. That probably was good since otherwise I would
have braked too much going over the rough stuff on the other side. But
the bike just flew over it.
Then there was a singletrack section which had bunch of sandy
switchbacks with steps in them and in one of them I just went over the
bars since the sandy surface didn't make my wheel rolling around the
corner. But nothing happened. I continued, got shaken good by the rutted
sections and finally got to the bottom.
Scott just switched his Nomad for his Hardtail and we were going back up
again. At the top, Scott started messing with his seat, tried to fix it
and we went on for our second training run. Somewhere in the switchbacks
I saw him at the side of the trail with his seatpost about to
disintegrate. At the bottom he tried to fix it and he got the regular
500 opinions from 500 people on how to fix it. In the end he came up
with a very neat contraption, which looked hilarious. I think most of
the people made a photo of that so there should be a picture coming up
soon.

Then it was finally time for the race. We headed back up and at the
start were like 100 people waiting to race that course. With 1 minute
time gaps you can calculate how long I had to wait. Got a mild sunburn
while waiting (yeah, it was actually gorgeous weather) and at some point
it was my turn to go.

My goal was not to embarrass myself and not to get caught by guy after
me. The latter wasn't that hard since the whole run only took 3-4
minutes, depending on the rider. So I shot down the fireroad section,
always telling myself "take the finger of the brake! let it run!" and I
was feeling pretty fast. Then I got into the singletrack section, which
by now has been pretty beaten up by all the riders. Especially the brake
bumps in the corners were killing me. But I got through it without
problems, but also pretty slow. At the bottom was a section which was
very smooth, flat and at one point even ascending. So I started kicking
the pedals as fast as possible to race to the finish line.

So I ended up 5th in the HT class, out of 8. I was ok with it since I
also wouldn't have been last in the sports category of my age class.

Now I'm looking forward to my new bike even more, I definitely will do
that again. Props to Jeff, Scott, Rich and all the others who won medals
in our group. Next time, though, we have to send down Scott in 3
categories, so that he can get one medal of each color ;)

Erik

PS: the barbecue afterwards was awesome too :D