5012 Oregon Haus: Echo Red-to-Red: OR XC MTB Race #1

Last, last weekend (the weekend of March 12/13 - I'm perpetually behind these days) - Thor and I rolled out to Echo, OR for the first OR XC MTB series race of 2011, and more importantly: the first camping trip of 2011!!!! We headed out with good buds Sarah, Emily & Josh (Becky had to stay home and be a genius prepping for her thesis defense coming up this spring). The race was on Saturday, so we rolled out on Friday right after work so we could squeeze two evenings of camping in.   Once again - photos are in no particular order (although I think I figured out what I am doing wrong - so I'm going to try loading my pics differently the next time and we'll see what happens).

Sarah's Race report (brief): For the first race of 2011 I raced in the Cat 2 19-34 Women's category. I felt really good - and ended up winning my race by a healthy margin of ~7 minutes. I think this means I should probably upgrade to Cat 1 for my next XC race - although I am cranky about this because it means I have much less chance of winning any sort of prizes this year. Yes, yes, I know - silly to be concerned about prizes - but I love them! I sort of feel like a little kid - I get stoked about pretty much anything (except hand-drawn paper awards). At this race I won a bottle of Sno Road Red-to-Red cabernet sauvignon from Sno Road Winery - very exciting!
    I raced on my new Niner hard tail that Thor just finished building up - and it felt fast! I was concerned about how my back would do over 24 miles with no rear shock, but although it was a bit tired by the end I was pleasantly surprised by how good I actually felt.   The first 1.5 miles or so of the race was on a gravel road - so you really had to push it to try and get good position in the field heading into the single track portion. I didn't pay attention at the start of the race, and thought that they were going to send the women out separately from the men - but that wasn't the case - so I ended up having a pretty poor position at the back of the pack heading out (note to self: pay attention to pre-race announcements). I had to do a lot of passing once I got onto the single track - but fortunately there were quite a few 'flattish' sections to power out and around people - so I didn't feel like it was too bad.
    About 2/3 of the way into the race I caught up with the leader of my field - although I didn't realize she was in my category - I whipped around her without paying much attention - and was then surprised when she passed me again about 3 minutes later. It was only then that I noticed she had the same color plate as me - which meant we had started at the same time. We rode together for the next couple of miles until I managed to hit my pedal on something and send myself flying over the handlebars - I never saw it coming! I landed pretty hard on my hands, but was able to pop up and get right back on my bike. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make up the 30-or-so seconds that I lost, but it turned out at the end that this other woman was a 35+ rider - so that's how I managed to win my race anyways despite the crash.

Thor's Race Report (even briefer): I had hoped to get a report from Thor himself - but as of press time (already late!) he still hadn't written anything up - so here's my version:   Thor is getting strong this year - he is riding a hard tail single speed that he bought from a friend of ours, and I'm impressed with his ability to ride that thing without totally bonking! It sounds like Thor was having a great race in the Men's SS category - until he went into a corner way too hot and peeled his tire of the rim. Oops. Epic crash - but he was fine - and 30 minutes later he was back on the course and was able to finish his race. No DNF - yay!   He had a great time - aside from thinking that the extra, muddy section that they tacked onto the Pro/Cat1/SS course was a total pile because it was 'too much like a cx course.'

Here are two pictures of Thor and I racing from Oregon Velo:

Okay - onto the fun stuff - camping!   We LOVE to camp. And Emily, Sarah & Josh also LOVE to camp. And we all LOVE to ride bikes. So it makes it especially fun when we are able to combine the two and camp and ride bikes all in the same weekend.   It's almost too much. The Sno Road Winery owns the land the course runs on, and they very graciously opened up a piece for racers to camp on for the weekend - it was perfect. The temperature was pretty chilly, but dry (mostly) - and we were able to see the stars at night, so I count that as a good camping trip. We ate good food, remembered the half & half for our coffee, and had plenty of bourbon in cider in the evenings - so it was a great start to the 2011 camping season.
    We stayed out camping on Saturday night too - and rode the course again on Sunday. Lovely.

Josh - and our truck full of bikes pre-race on Saturday morning

A view of the country we were riding through - from our ride on Sunday.

Thor, Josh, Sarah & Emily on the Sunday ride

Self portrait with my super fashionable shades (unfortunately they are REALLY comfortable, and don't fog at all....but I kind of feel like they look ridiculous)