This year was a biggie for me, I hit one of those milestone birthdays. To celebrate I did something I've been a bit nervous of doing, I entered a bike race.
TBH, I'm not a shredder on the bike, I'm more of an 'enjoy the ride' kind of rider. Because of this, I told Mrs OA that my goal was a modest one: ride the course cleanly, finish it and not be too slow. I even managed to get in a bit of practice in the area, just as well as there are some tricky sections on the course. Like this:
I opted to enter a (relatively local) first race, the ESC Enduro race at Diamond Hill in RI. Over the winter I put in base miles and interval training on the cyclocross bike, then as soon as the snow finally left I started on the mountain bike. The weather here was cold but not too wet, then it all changed...
...the rain started and didn't stop. Come race day it was a sloppy mudfest very quickly churned to peanut butter like consistency. The rock feature above was slick as snot and had quite the high pucker factor to enter it. Here's me in about the same position as the guy above, there's no going back at this point.
Folks were sliding all over and falling off everywhere. I managed to ride most of it cleanly, I only went down once. I hit a muddy berm too quickly and lost my front wheel right before the end of a timed section. After dropping a liberal spray of F-bombs I looked up to see spectators staring at me aghast. I immediately apologized and got back into the race.
This is me a bit later:
TBH, I'm not a shredder on the bike, I'm more of an 'enjoy the ride' kind of rider. Because of this, I told Mrs OA that my goal was a modest one: ride the course cleanly, finish it and not be too slow. I even managed to get in a bit of practice in the area, just as well as there are some tricky sections on the course. Like this:
(photo is not me, its from Roots and Rain's coverage of the race)
I opted to enter a (relatively local) first race, the ESC Enduro race at Diamond Hill in RI. Over the winter I put in base miles and interval training on the cyclocross bike, then as soon as the snow finally left I started on the mountain bike. The weather here was cold but not too wet, then it all changed...
...the rain started and didn't stop. Come race day it was a sloppy mudfest very quickly churned to peanut butter like consistency. The rock feature above was slick as snot and had quite the high pucker factor to enter it. Here's me in about the same position as the guy above, there's no going back at this point.
Folks were sliding all over and falling off everywhere. I managed to ride most of it cleanly, I only went down once. I hit a muddy berm too quickly and lost my front wheel right before the end of a timed section. After dropping a liberal spray of F-bombs I looked up to see spectators staring at me aghast. I immediately apologized and got back into the race.
This is me a bit later:
So, how did I do on my goal? Well, time to come clean, my REAL goal was: ride the course and not to be last! Given the conditions on the day I was happy with my day out, the course was great, the race was fun, the other riders a decent bunch. And the icing on the cake, I was NOT last in my age bracket ! OK, I was third from last out of 11, but that's OK with me.
A bit of data nerdery: I used my GPS and Strava on the day. In riding for practice I had ridden 5 of the 6 sections, in practice timing I was about the middle of the pack of 'all time' riders on those sections. On race day, even though we were riding in peanut butter mud, I ended up getting 'Personal bests' on 4 of the 5 sections. It turned out that approx. 100 other riders were also using Strava on race day (numbers varied a bit due to "did not finish" drop outs over the day). Of those hundred or so riders it looks like they are the quicker Strava users as I was way off the pace, instead of middle pack I was down in the last 10% (92-95) of the slowest for 5 of 6 timed sections. One section I really enjoyed, I had a great bit of banter at the top with another rider so we were pushing it and it showed, I ended up 65th on that section!
Pinkbike has a decent summary and video up:
https://www.pinkbike.com/news/video-and-race-report-eastern-states-cup-enduro-1-diamond-hill-rhode-island.html
(I'm on it! no, not riding, I'm standing in the rain getting wet at the briefing at around 28s)
Phew, so what's next? Well I'm still not fast. But I really enjoyed the race day atmosphere and camaraderie, so I would like to do another this summer. The Family schedule is filling fast but I think I can pull it off.
Well done. Last time I did a race I got destroyed by some `Cat 2' ringers the other team had. Still it was fun. I prefer Audax riding although I haven't done that in years.
ReplyDeleteRight on! Way to make a plan and carry it out. Listening to some of the folks at work it sounds like stavra is for the pretty serious bikers who like to excel at things. I imagine that the pool you are comparing to has a high selection bias for high performers.
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