Oval Crash

The next day we raced on pretty much the same course but with the pump track removed as it had to be opened for the downhill mountain bikers. To make the course a little longer there were a few modifications to the course. The result was a more technical course with lots of sharp, leg shredding power climbs.

I was back to racing my usual Sport category, although a little tired from racing the night before but most of us were in the same boat. I was really aiming to try and make podium this race but a lot of the top guys had come out so it was going to be another hard battle. I once again started right up at the front of the pack for the start.

The start was pretty fast and it was all the usual suspects in the top 10. Personally I like having the long climb to start off the race, it really strings things out pretty quickly and the start isn’t nearly as chaotic. My legs were feeling pretty good and I felt that the course really suited me. There were parts of the course that threw me off because I was so used to the course the day before…so some of the minor changes kept catching me off-guard despite having done a few practice laps.

We got to the sand pit and I decided I would try to ride it the first few laps to keep in the top group. I went behind another rider so I could follow his line through but he lost a lot of momentum and stopped right in front of me. I started to dismount from my bike but a rider had gone really hot into the pit and couldn’t slow down in time so he ended up running right into my bike. I managed to untangle my bike and started running but when I remounted and tried to pedal, I found out my chain had come off from the crash. I fumbled it back on as I was a little flustered having lost about 10 positions. I remounted and now came the hard task of trying to focus to getting back in the race.

I was pretty mad at this point as I was really hoping to get podium in this race and I was now near the back. But it was first lap so I tried not to panic, ride consistently and try to ride the rest of the race clean. I don’t know what it is, but I entered into a zone where I was just concentrating purely on my race and trying to ride cleanly. I was starting to pull people back in by my third lap and that just fueled me to keep going hard. Lap 4 I had caught up to Brent and was now trying to catch up to Thomas. The last lap, I managed to catch up to Thomas and was trying to hang on to his wheel.

After the sand pit we went into the technical section of the course when Thomas lost grip in his back wheel and bailed. I just managed to ride around him, but he was up running with his bike as I was trying to pedal up the hill. He remounted just as I cleared the hill, but I was lucky to have a little more momentum and managed to gap him slightly going into the final stretch of the climb to the finish.

As I climbed I could see Mark in front of me. 50 meters from the finish, I attacked and sprinted for the finish to beat him by 1 second.

Result: 5th

I was completely surprised by my result….even more than usual, I was glad I was able to re-focus after having a bad first lap. I rode a clean race from that point forward and managed to finish up in the prizing again. Mark got me by one second at the Hop N’ Hurl so it was pretty funny that I beat him by the same margin this time. This was also one the reason I love bike racing, after the race Mark and I shook hands and had a great time talking about our neck-to-neck battles in the last couple races.

Photo Credits: Trevor Jensen and Rod Loewen