2017: Chasing the elusive W

Top: Lake Havasu in February, Bottom: Park City in August.

My 2017 racing season started in Lake Havasu for the Havasu Havoc in February which turned out to be a nice early season option. It was our first time visiting Havasu and we enjoyed it even though it's yet-another desert. The town has decent food and RV options, the mountain biking is decent, and the Havoc organizers did a good job with the course and event.

Part of the reason for racing my mountain bike in February was to prepare for Moab Rocks, the 3-day stage race I decided to participate in. This would be my first mountain bike stage race and my first time racing in Moab. We've been fortunate enough to spend a significant amount of time in the last 20 years or so, but this was my first race there.

Moab Rocks started the first day with a climb out of town to the top of Porcupine which worked out well for me, then I realized I brought a knife to a gun fight in the form of a 100 mm-travel bike. I thoroughly love my Trek Top Fuel and we do really well together, but the guys with 130+mm bikes zoomed by us on Porcupine making us feel like we had our names on our helmets. Not pretty. Regardless, we spanked the course to our best ability and earned a bunch of PRs on our way 
down.

The next 2 days taught me about stage racing on the mountain bike. Turns out there's still nowhere to hide on the mountain bike and stage racing is no different. Day 2 was a ton of fun in the Klondike area and my legs weren't quite happy about the intensity 2 days in a row. Day 3 at Mag 7 resulted in my legs and I having a disagreement during the second half of the climb. I lost the argument. We finished anyway, we accomplished a 3 day stage race, and I learned I need to do things differently if I expect to work that hard day after day.

In April came the Epic Rides Whiskey Off-Road in Prescott, AZ. I had that event on my to-do list for many years and finally made it over there. Vanessa also decided to take part in the fun by riding the 15-Proof on Friday which allowed me to spectate, cheer, and do a bit of crewing for her with the pup.

Another first time event in 2017, there's really never enough time to preride such a large course, so it's "blind" racing. The Whiskey single track can be burly and surprisingly rocky. I wasn't expecting some of the skinnier rocky trail but it was a good challenge. The whole course is super scenic, even the massive dirt road climb out of Skull Valley.

There's something special about descending forever on the road that you know you have to climb back. Everything in your head is telling you to stop and turn around to avoid all that work. It's masochistic. Maybe this particular dirt road is MASSochistic because I got to experience the "stop you idiot! Turn the F@#$ around!" voices for nearly 25 minutes of descending. To add to the fun, we were in a medium sized group of guys taking turns pulling at the front to go even faster descending and causing the descent to be a hard effort instead of a gravity-fed cruise.

Then we finally get to turn around and head uphill. Climbers rejoice. A bunch of people now decide it's their turn and ratchet up the effort to various degrees of pain. And after descending for 25 minutes the climb takes some serious time to conquer. I try my best to hang with the pace, stay in the top 5 area of the group we descended with, and we start picking off riders. The climbing group reduces in size in front of me and behind me for awhile and the rhythm becomes tolerable. Then there were three. Somehow only three of us continue to ride at the same pace, still picking off people that started the climb too fast and paid the price. I take a pull, someone else does, I get back to take a pull, I tend to do best when I stand and it's steep, and then, no one. I just rode everyone off my wheel during a hour and fifteen minute climb. All those hardcore guys foaming at the mouth on the descend making me barely hang on and making me curse the pace, gone. Heh.

At the top of this insane climb is a whiskey hand up and some excellent singletrack. Yeah, let's do both please. Then the paved road back to town for the finish. Pretty great event actually. As I'm writing this many months later I still feel accomplished for riding everyone off my wheel and am looking forward to this event again. Yeah, MASSochistic I know.

Three days after we return from Prescott I crash at 40 mph on my road bike. I'm down for a few weeks but luckily didn't break anything on my body.

I get the pieces back together and we later head to Bend, OR for the High Cascades 100. Winter snow accumulation forced a lower elevation course which I have no way to know if it's good or bad, and once again I'm racing "blind"; maybe it's the theme of the year. I ended up finishing in 8:35 averaging 11.9 mph for 100 miles while making approximately 16.5 MILLION turns. That is a twisty course. Fun singletrack all day, and I didn't realize I would ever want singletrack turns to end until that day. Bend has excellent fun trails, lots of them, with lots of turns. And lots of dust. I'd go back for sure regardless of the dust cause I love riding in forests and Bend has a ton of trails.

My 2017 finale was Point 2 Point.  This would be my third time participating in this event after taking a 5 year break from 2012. That year's drama included a missed 1.5 mile section of course. This year's drama involved a broken seat.

I was in good shape at this point in the season. I had a goal of 7:30 for this ridiculously difficult race. I had studied my competition, I knew some guys from the rest of the season and noticed they did well in past years at P2p, I knew their race kits, and I knew their bib numbers. I was going to stick with those guys as long as I could. I wasn't screwing around at the start to have a bunch of traffic; race on.

And, while riding in the group I wanted to be in during the Round Valley section, I make a simple mistake, slide off on a simple curve, and my saddle breaks. Lovely.

My most amazing crew is only a few miles away though, and I tucked a spare saddle in a bag just in case. Just in case I break a saddle, because I had a bad rash of breaking saddles recently. It took 1 minute and 47 seconds to fix and I was on my way to an excellent 7:36 finish, averaging 10.6 mph for 79 miles and 11,000 feet of climbing. Good day that earned me a 5th place podium and a year's worth of Natural Delights Medjool Dates!

No wins in 2017. I got close with a few second and third place finishes. I'll keep digging. It was a successful racing year which took us all over the western U.S. I'll take it.