Friday night I made the all to common "last minute" decision to race saturday. Since I feel its still pretty early in the season i haven't gotten things organized and ready so I scrambled around friday evening to prepare for the early morning. I made some bike adjustments after thursday nights ride at Blue Knob with a new chain and air adjustment to the fork which was low.
Saturday I woke up with everything ready grabbed some coffee and out the door to meet friends.
We arrived at Wisp early enough to relax and I got things ready including the ridiculous number pinning required. (Its a mountain bike race for Gods sake, we don't pin numbers, hahaha) Off to pre ride a little and during this time I quickly realized that I had made a major mistake. Not changing the cassette with the chain when it was completely worn out left me with a drive train that skipped around more than a school girl who had just gotten her first kiss!
Time to improvise, so i found a short step hill and ran through the combos that worked the best and hoped that i didnt suffer a major case of skipping during the race or drop the chain all together.
Luckily I go for fun and i simply made the best of my situation and lined up. Off we went and I quickly moved to the front, down the hillside we went straight from fireroads to an awesome raked out rocky trail. Down down down we went until I hit a creek at which time I felt my fork compress but didn't feel it rebound much. As i made it through the rocks and back onto a gravel roadway I determined that my fork had lost some of its positive pressure which it continued to do for the rest of the race. Oh boy one more thing to adjust to, but this was hard as it changed the geometry of my bike and added a back beating to the overall days ride. Never the less I raced on. By the start of my 3rd and final lap I had a nice lead so this is where experience tells me to ride smarter. Bad drive train + fork pressure problems + good lead means ride conservatively. This is what I did by watching back but riding steady to keep a lead until the final 1/4 mile where someone was closing the gap to me.
I looked ahead and looked back to determine if the other racers speed should be of concern but quickly realized that if I simply stayed steady he wouldn't get close enough to make me sprint or increase my speed. However he would close the gap down to less than a minute. That was ok with me i just didn't want to let the overall go after working so hard for a lead early in the race.
I crossed the line happy to have won but my mind immediatly went to a mental checklist of things I needed to repair on my bike. A new cassette and troubleshooting the fork were the first two things. Turns out the valve on my positive air chamber went bad and was allowing pressure to bleed off. I had 20psi less in the positive side by the finish of the race and a horrible backache from it.The cassette was simply throw one away and put a new on on!
JR Petsko put on a wonderful race with some class A single-track and thanks to GWadzilla for the picture seen above.
Big thanks:
- to my friend Daryl for hauling me and my equipment down to the event.
- to Sharon for the homemade cookies. Yum!
- Trek for an awesome bike (superfly hartail)
- SRAM for a truely fantastic drivetrain, able to still hammer out 24 miles even with a neglected maint program on the owners part.
All I can say is that I was having fun for sure!
Stork
