Last week I got an e-mail from Mark over at Vesrah asking if I could fill in for him this weekend at the 12 hours of Kettle. I had a pretty hard day scheduled anyway for Saturday so I figured why not.
Saturday morning I got to the parking lot at 7am. I didn't know the guys I was going to be riding with and one guy flagged me down to go park with them. Turns out they weren't my team but the guys we were going to be racing against. I walked around for a while looking for my team but with no luck. I checked with registration and they hadn't even signed in yet. Finally at 7:45, 15 minutes before the start I decided that I would just register for the 12 hour solo and ride as long as I could. As I was going up to registration I seen their tent. That was a close one...I really didn't want to ride for 12 hours!! Mark was the first guy to go off and got us a really good start. With only 2 duo teams in front of us he gave me clear sailing for my lap. I got around the 2 guys in about 2-3 miles and then put it in TT mode racing the clock. There was a ton of new single track and it was a little wet, I didn't want to start the day off crashing my brains out, so I pushed hard on the flats and took it pretty easy in the tight stuff.
The rest of the day was like any other team endurance race, warm up - ride - cool down - eat - repeat. At 3pm Mark had to leave so he jumped one position in the order and threw down a smoke'n lap joining me in the 40 minute club. With him gone our rides got a little closer, I think that worked good because I wouldn't get as relaxed and wound down between rides. As the day progressed the trails got faster and faster I was throwing the bike into corners just taunting the tires to break loose but they refused, I should have been running this all season they are definitely staying on for the rest!
By the end of the day we had knocked off 14 laps and the win!! We finished about 15 minutes up on second place, who had been consitantly on our heals the entire day. I had achieved my goal to set the fastest lap of the day at 46:34 minutes, although I wish they would have let the 6 hour guys do the same course as us. There were some really fast guys that showed up and it would have been fun to see what they could have turned. My legs finally felt like they had come around, when I wanted power they were there. Hopefully we can carry that over into this weekend.
I will try to get some pictures up here as soon as I can.
1 comment:
Excellent riding Neil. It was great to have you on the team!
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