May 1st is my sister's birthday, and she lives up in Canada where we are from. From riding around there when I visit, I noticed there is an XC race course in town and, given the race was on the 3rd it seemed like a good idea to go up for the weekend and bring my mountain bike.
I got my frame back from repairs a few days earlier and it's looking good as new, so there's that, plus I bought a new front tire.
Instead of the Ikons I've been using I thought I would try something with a little more tread up front. I'm thinking a little more grip will make the bike even more fun to ride, and also faster on the downhill sections. It's still a light and fast rolling tire but has a little bigger knobs, especially on the sides. Ikons have been great and roll fast, and have plenty of grip on hardpack, but when you get into looser stuff there isn't a lot of traction. Will keep an ikon in the rear but so far this new thing up front is pretty good.
So anyway, that race. Given that I don't have an international race license (I could add one to my usa license for about $100 if I was going to race up there more often), I had to sign up for the "citizen" class, which is where every one else with a one day license ended up. In the US, if you've raced with a license before you can't do the one day thing, but I don't think that's a rule there and I don't think it would matter for me being from out of country anyway.
There were about 10 other guys in the category and we did 2 laps around the ~20 min course. I would have preferred to be in the 3 lap "sport" race, mostly because it started at noon instead of 10 am the day after my sister's birthday party.
For such a flat part of the world, Lethbridge manages to have a pretty decent mountain bike course. The coulees are a big 300 foot deep river valley, and the course goes along the top of them, drops down, climbs most of the way back up, drops down again through rolling terrain and across a creek (with two skinny bridge crossings), then back up and along the top to the start/finish line. It works out to about 4.5 miles and 500 vertical feet a lap, although in a little different manner from courses like Missoula XC, where you ride up a hill, then go back down the hill. Some of the local guys did a lot of work to the trails in the weeks before the race, building and improving berms and smoothing out the steep part of the first descent, which used to be loose and have a really narrow groove eroded down the center of it.
We started along with novice men and the juniors, with both going ahead of our group, I assume because we were expected to be the slowest. Juniors had a good head start, but the novice men only started about 30sec in front of us.
A local guy and one of the trail builders, Jonny, got out front on the sprint, and I started badly, not clipping in efficiently. I ending up 4th behind two other guys on the initial flat section. I passed one right before dropping into the coulee and then got ahead of the other guy at the start of the first climb. The leader had a pretty good gap by that point, and passed a group of 5 riders in another group right before the second descent back down. I caught them right at the top, and was stuck behind them nearly all the way to the climb back up to the top and start/finish area. By then 3rd and 4th were right back behind me and Jonny was long gone. I went up the hill fairly hard and by the top was all alone. Everyone was spread out for the second lap, so I got a pretty clean run at the whole thing and rolled across the finish line comfortably in 2nd.
Looking at strava, I had managed to do both laps in exactly the same amount of time, which seemed strange to me because I didn't get held up at all the 2nd lap and felt like I was riding much faster. Closer analysis showed I had lost over 30 seconds to the group of guys on the 1st lap and also was faster on the finishing top section for the 2nd lap because I got into a little "race" with a Junior I'd caught. I climbed at the same speed, and it turns out I lost all that made up time on the first part of the 2nd lap, over the bumpy track to descent and then down, due to not being in a sprint chasing the leader and trying to pass guys. Moral of the story: ride faster all the time.
I'd post some pictures but haven't been able to find any online yet. For some reason I always notice all the cameras and see people taking picture of me at races, but then rarely see anything afterward. Dear photographers, if you're at an event, it might be a good idea to post a link to your site or gallery on the race facebook page or something. If I come across something, I'll update the post.
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