Storm Hill Country Mountain Bike Challenge in Flat Rock Ranch, Comfort Texas March 13-14, 2010
This was the second race of the season in the Spring TMBRA Mountain biking series so my friend Charity and I packed up her truck and headed down to the beautiful hill country of Texas for some mountain bike racing. From Dallas, it’s about a five and a half hour drive to Comfort. The weekend festivities were to kick off on Saturday morning with a Cat 1 Short track race followed by a time trial for all levels. The cross country race was all day Sunday. I had decided to go ahead and race Cat 2 for this race since this was my first TMBRA race of the year, and I had not done many TMBRA races in the past few years to qualify to move up to race the super fast girls in Cat 1. This course was pretty technical, but very fun! Saturday started off very chilly with frost on the tent. We went for a morning run to start off the day…. And brrrrrrrrrrrr…. It couldn’t have been more than 35 degrees! Lucky for all of us, it started to warm up quickly. We headed down to the race site for the ladies Cat 1 short track race. These girls were FAST! Christina Smith smoked all the girls! It was a blast to watch! A little intimidating though. After the short track races I headed out for a pre-ride of the time trial course. It was a super fast course with a few fun downhills and a couple of short climbs. I finished up two laps and headed over to see when I was scheduled to start. 4:30? Wow.. .that’s late. I had two hours to kill, but didn’t think that continuing to ride was a smart bet. So, I headed back to camp to chill out. Charity had decided to go and pre-ride the entire course and not do the time trial. I managed to sit still for about an hour and a half then took off to warm up on the short track course. I was informed that they were running about 20 minutes late. Ugh… more waiting. Finally they called me up to the staging area. My heart was racing! (about 140 bpm to be exact… .crazy excited). I had to wait 3 minutes before I could go after the girl in front of me went. There were several riders that didn’t do the time trial so their times were empty. Finally….. GO. I pushed my pedals as hard as I could, around the corner and up the hill. I’m not sure that I have pushed that hard in a race before. This was a pretty fast pace to maintain, but I felt that I could do it for the 4 miles. Ok.. so maybe I lasted two of the four before I had to let off the gas a bit. Geez.. this course didn’t seem this long when I was pre-riding it earlier!!!! And then finally I came to the last climb, came down the hill across the road, across the creek and up to the finish line! Whoooooo! That was fun. I looked down at my watch and I think I did pretty good! I was WIPED out though. I rode over and waited for the Cat 1 girls to come in behind me.. and sure enough… they were pretty close behind. I ended up in second place for the Time Trial. I was pretty happy with that. I knew at that point that I had some good competition for tomorrow’s cross country race. I came in 11 seconds behind first place, and third place was only about twenty seconds behind me. I was starving and exhausted so I headed back to camp for a quick freezing shower, and to start on dinner. After dinner we all hung out around the giant community camp fire and chatted. I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open, so I headed to bed pretty early. Thank you ipod for providing me with relaxing music over the goof balls still carrying on around the fire! Tomorrow was going to be a long day. 23 miles out there. That might be the longest mountain bike race that I’ve done, besides the endurance races. Our race was to start at 10:21am. The festivities began pretty early with registration opening at 7:00am so I think everyone in camp had an early wake up call with all of the announcements. I was a little nervous, but not too bad. Breakfast down the hatch and time to get warmed up. It was not as cold this morning as it was Saturday. Which was a good thing! I was very excited to see all the girls that came out for this race. I think in our Cat 2 group we had over 20 women representing! I love it! I see some familiar faces, and some new faces as well. We started out and I decided to follow a friends advice and let the girls blow up on the first hill. I hung back and just took it easy for the first mile or so.. then kicked it up a bit. I picked them off one by one until I had some room in front of me to do some climbing. I was regretting at this point not pre-riding the course. There were some technical parts that I think I could have gotten through a bit faster had I seen them before… but that’s part of the game I guess. I was feeling pretty good, but I had no idea how long I’d been going. I forgot to hit the start button on my watch, and I have no computer on my bike. Ouch! So I’m flying blind… just riding at a level that I knew I could maintain for a while. Trying to not push myself so hard that I crapped out early. I did remember that Charity told me the first part was about 11 miles, and the second part was about 12 miles. The course would drop you back into the starting area for the time trial and then you would go out on the upper loop. I had two girls that I was riding with for quite a ways. We kept passing each other in different areas we were stronger riders in. I was climbing well today, Dina hauled it on the down hills and Michele was also good on the downs. My little hard tail was not taking all those rocks so well. I was having a bit of a hard time controlling it at a high speed so I was taking it a bit slower. I’d catch both of them on the flats though… and pass them on the climbs. We finally got to Hospital Hill… and there were a lot of spectators around. I had read about this drop and saw the three down arrows… ahhhhhhhh…. No. Not going to risk it. I quickly dismount and walk down. I got a lot of boos from this move, but I shrugged and said… “Hey.. I’m from Dallas” and I kept right on riding. I know that’s no excuse… and I really need to work on my drops, but it is what it is. I knew that I was about half way done with the race. My legs were feeling a bit tired, but I knew I had it. We started on the time trial course which put us to the upper loop. And they weren’t kidding about the “upper” part of that name. Oh wow there was some climbing involved. I was behind Dina and Michele now and just trucking along. We finally crested the hill (shew!) and we started on some technical rocky descending when I heard my fork start making some not so pleasant sounds as well as feeling like it was bottoming out. Really? So, the further I go, the worse the fork, and the more my shoulders are taking a beating. It sounded like it was going to pop through the top of the fork, and was making a nice “ding” sound on my rotor. For those of you that know this course… you can imagine that riding this loop with a hard tail is already a beating. And now with a fork malfunction…. Great. I tried to keep my speed up where possible and tried to take the bumps with as much grace as possible. I’ll tell you though… the last half of this race was a bit brutal. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy to see the finish line! I really had no idea how long it took me to do the entire course. I do know that no other girls passed me while on the upper loop so I knew I couldn’t have been last. Since Charity was just out there for a training ride, and she didn’t pass me! I headed straight over for the Sun & Ski tent to see if they could figure out what was malfunctioning with my fork. Luckily one of their mechanics was there so he messed with the air settings. It apparently had not been bottoming out, but he couldn’t really tell what the issue was. Oh well.. I’m finished racing for the day and it’s time to relax a bit! It took quite a while, but the results were finally posted. I finished 4th in the cross country race, and 2nd in the Time Trial. I ended up in 1st place in the overall General Classification. Whooooo! I’ll take it. Just a quick thanks to the guys over at Sun & Ski San Antonio! You guys ROCK! To Charity and all the girls in my category that pushed me to keep going. To Tobin, Cap and all the other guys that put on one hell of a great race! I’ll certainly be back to race this one again! Overall it was a fantastic racing weekend!!! Till next time!
