Big Wisconsin Week Part 1

Epic is incredibly overused these days. So much so that it's even become cliche to make fun of the whole "EPIC" thing. Regardless, my plan for last week was to be epic. Tons of extra hrs at work, Tuesday night test ride on the Mamasita at Eastwood, Wednesday night group ride (turned into a 90 minute 34 mile hammerfest with Bob and I pulling 80% of the time due to impending thunderstorms), WTR Thursday race, 10 hrs of work and packing and driving to Madison for the weekend Friday, Wisconsin SS championships Saturday AM followed by the 3 hr WEMS race in the evening, L'Alpe Bleu Huez road TT/hill climb Sunday AM and rogue Steven's Point trails plus hot tubbing in the evening, then both Standing Rocks and 9 Mile Monday plus the return 3.5 hr drive.


River Falls Thursday nights are done for the year. Trevor and I went over for the last one with the single speeds. I wanted to give my setup one legit test prior to trying to race it this weekend. Turns out Heath W. also made the trip (and was riding Ss too), the competition was going to be fierce. I think roughly 20 other riders showed up too. Heath took off pretty hot at the start and it took some work to hang on through the first section. The course had seen about an inch of rain the night before and many of the corners were treacherous. I noted that I would have been better off on my Mountain Kings. We came to the Jeep Trail climb and I had to let Heath go. I don't know what he was geared at, but it was much stronger than my 38x20, I doubt he had much of a choice other than to hammer the climb. At that point Trevor had worked his way through some lap traffic and was up with me. We caught back up to Heath early into the single track and the 3 of us would, more or less, ride together for about a lap. At one point I did fall pretty hard in a corner and was forced to work alone for a bit to catch back on. Then Heath went down and Trevor attacked. From there it was everyone for themselves. Heath and I had a bit of a battle, but I think I was mostly just in his way and he went by with about a lap to go. I considered really pushing hard to catch up and started to crank up the intensity but that almost instantly resulted in the hardest mtb fall I've taken this year... I don't even really know what happened, but I was over the bars and flying near horizontally at 10 or 12 mph then landing on hands and knees in a stinking puddle of mud with a rock hard bottom. Shook it off and rode a bit easier the rest of the way in. I was 4 minutes behind Trevor and 2? behind Heath.

It was a great season of races over there. KORC has things right- can't beat the friendly competitive environment, excellent trails and fun-for-all format. Look forward to trying to close some of that gap in the "off" season and certainly look forward to more of these races next year. Thanks KORC! I'll be renewing my membership.




o, btw- check this out