Castlewood 1, Boz 0

Saturday was the do or die day. Depending on my results in the race, I was either sticking to the roads for the rest of the season or continuing my plans to race both mountain and road for the remainder of the year. Specifically what sort of result was I looking for? Depended on the field. As it turns out, we had 40 racers in the Sport class field. Nope, that's not a misprint, 40 racers. It was an awesome sight for sure. Actually looked like the start of a crit race. The only sight that surpassed that was the sight of 7 of my ICCC brothers lined up to represent.

I felt good coming into the race. I had two weeks of good training coming into the race and took a few days off before the race. I lined up near the front, but I wasn't overly worried about staying in front leaving the field. I knew there would be plenty of legs and lungs exploding on the Lone Wolf climb. My plan was to start hitting the gas near the top waterbar and begin picking off riders. I was fairly successful, but watched the top 5-6 guys immediately open a gap as we neared the castle. About that time, Superman Matt Keevan was killing the pace on his singlespeed (his race started 1 minute behind ours) as he began picking his way through our field. I rode behind him until the first bridge on Love and then he was gone like a rocket.

The first lap was a train of riders heading through Love and Rollercoaster. Good clean racing all around. As we neared the lower Grotpeter fireroad descent, I grabbed a little gel and drank three big swigs of Heed and settled in for the second climb of Lone Wolf. As we climbed Lone Wolf, our pack of riders splintered a little but regrouped closer to the Ranger Station. The pace was not overly fast, but it was strong as we rolled towards the top of Love. As we started to dump onto the connector I missed two upshift attempts and that brought the group right on me. Having snapped out of my rhythm, I also fought hard to get back into the flow of the trail and that brought everyone onto my tail.

I was second in the train of 5 riders all within seconds of each other and I knew I needed to keep it moving. About that time, John Peiffer made a totally legit, albeit stealthy pass on me. Surprising, with plenty of trail for all, and as quietly as a tiger. Within the blink of an eye, he was riding second in the train and putting pressure on our leader. At the next possible chance he took over on the front of the pack and was immediately gapping us by busting down Grotpeter. I didn't want to get gapped badly and was beginning to get anxious to get around my rider. As we neared the upper waterbars, I decided to back off a little, recover, and then hit the gas hard coming out of the tree root hairpin. As we flew down the last waterbar, I aggressively grabbed a little too much air and landed hard on a rock immediately blowing my front tire off the rim. The tire exploded with a large crack similar to the sound of a rifle. The rider ahead of me yelled out, "What was that!" while I rode the rim down the rocks and narrowly avoided a massive crash.

As I assessed the situation, I realized I had rocks in my rim and tire and not much Stan's left. Within seconds, I removed the valve core and put in a tube. As I wiped the Stan's and rocks from my tire and got it all put together. As soon as I hit the valve with the CO2, the side of the tire blew out and the tube swelled to the size of a football. Disgusted, I threw everything down and knew it was a DNF. A good friend, Greg Suter, caught it all on video tape and as soon as I've got it loaded up, I'll have the whole thing on the blog for your viewing pleasure. (Inspecting the rim after getting back to the car revealed several chunks of the rim have been burred or ground down. Good thing I purchased the Mavic MP3 protection plan.)

Walking down the trail, I knew a top 10 was thrown out the window. I had the legs, the lungs, and the positioning. I discovered our group had almost 2 minutes on the rest of the field and while we weren't going to catch the top guys in the race, the field wasn't likely to catch us either. In the grand scheme of things, it was just one race and I didn't get hurt. That's cool. God has plans for all of us and this was his plan for me in this race. While I had a hard time dealing with the DNF, once I got my head around the bigger picture, I was okay with it.

It was so awesome seeing out ICCC'ers out there in full force. Congratulations to all of them!

3rd Zak Hafner
13th Bert Carlen
16th William Cahill
19th Rich Pierce
26th Todd Harris
30th Rob Oellermann
DNF Eric Lewis
DNF Scot Wallace

Thanks to Jim Moore, Kent Jones, and Scott & Babette Melies for cheering us on and giving us race support, too.

I'm definitely going to be mountain biking the rest of the season, along with the road events. I knew the sport would keep me tied in and I'm glad to see I'm ready to compete. Thanks to Bob Arnold and the DRJ crew, for putting together such a great race and Bill Howard for his officiating duties. It was a great day all around. I'll be back.