Race Report: Singletrack Cycles West Side Mountain Bike Series #1 – Dash Point State Park

Dave letting the big wheels roll...

Dave's first foray on dirt this season

Dave Acheson (Master Sport)

My first race as a member of the Methow Cycle & Sport – Blue Star Coffee Roasters team was this past weekend’s opener of the Singletrack Cycles Westside Mountain Bike Series.  It was a great chance to stretch my legs a bit in anticipation of the 2011 racing season.  The race was held at Dash Point State Park on a really fun course made up of slightly muddy and rooty singletrack with just enough elevation change to give the heart and lungs a real workout.  The weather gods even cooperated, providing racers with sunny skies and temperatures in the upper 30s.  All in all, a great recipe for an early season mountain bike race.

Being primarily a roadie, I generally don’t race my mountain bike more than a few times a year and then usually with no real expectations.  My approach to this race was just to use it to add a little intensity to my training and as an excuse to escape the snows of the Methow Valley if only for a day.  My race started pretty calmly with me settled in near the back of a thirty or so strong field strung out nose to tail on the twisty singletrack trails.  It took a good part of the partial lap that opened the race before enough space was appearing between riders to get a good look at the trails and to begin to think about passing. 

As the course began to reveal itself (I didn’t get a chance to pre-ride), I was reminded of just how much fun the correct amount of mud can be.  You need enough to get dirty and make the ride a little tricky, but not so much that it bogs you down.  I was very happy to have left large aggressive tires on my bike as opposed to the faster rolling tires I might have usually opted for.  Although this early season effort put the hurt on me at times, playing in the mud for most of the race left me giddy.

From a competitive standpoint, the race passed pretty unremarkably.  I passed a few riders here and there, got passed by others, and continually swapped places with a couple more.  When the end finally came, I’d finished 20^th of 27, or about what I would have expected for my current fitness.  I had a lot of fun and may try to add a couple more mountain bike races to my schedule before the road season kicks off for me in a couple months.

Keelan Christensen  (Junior Expert)

It was a cold morning for the first race of the year, and my first time on singletrack trails. “I would have never dreamed of racing on a morning where we have to scrape our windows,” I said to Dave as we loaded our bikes on his Subaru and left for the race. Dave’s friend, Tom, who was kind enough to let us crash at his place the night before the race, accompanied us to Dash Point. I’d like to give a big thank you to Tom for the place, and to his girlfriend who works for Xbox. She gave Dave and I our first experience with the Xbox Kinect, which was more than enough entertainment for the night preceding the race.

                Anyways, back to the race. I signed up for expert category while Dave and Tom raced sport. My race was at 10 and their race was at 11:30. We arrived at the venue around 9 and I was rushed to remember my pre-race routine. It was a weird venue, with a network of trails on the east side of the road, and a dense residential are on the west side, which meant plenty of roads to warm up on.

                The start of the expert race was interesting, with a couple of immediate bike failures within the first hundred feet of the start line. I guess their chains were a little rusty from the winter. Experts were to do a half lap, and then three laps of a very muddy course filled with skinny wood bridges and slippery roots. There wasn’t much of an elevation change to the course, but a lot of short hills to sprint and then short windy down hills. A fairly large number of singlespeeders participated in this race because it is a perfect singlespeed course. This was my first time on singletrack since November of last year, so it took me a lap or two to regain my confidence in the technical sections and in the mud. But by the second and third lap, I felt like I regained some of my strength from last year.

                I ended up finishing first in the Expert U-19 category. Overall I was really proud of my performance for basically two weeks of training prior to the race, and only one time on my mountain bike. Some of the Sport Juniors are jumping up to expert, so I’m looking forward to some heavy competition. I am also planning on racing the rest of this. I will be in D.C. for the race on March 6^th but am looking forward to the March 20^th race in Sammamish.