2009 Collegiate MTB Nationals

Another one is in the books. We headed out to Northstar at Tahoe for Collegiate MTB Nats. We had an entourage of people heading out to race and support the racers, 20 total people!! James, Peter, and Andy left on Tuesday evening and started driving our bikes out to the race. They pinned it out to NV and ended up getting there before we did! It was great, they got all checked into the condos and started getting our bikes all built up. The rest of us rolled in around 8:00 after some tasty dinner at In 'N Out. After a quick trip to the grocery store, we were pretty much all setup to have a great weekend!!

Thursday was XC preriding and DH track walking day. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately for me, one of the XC girls sucks and bailed on waiting to preride the course with one of our late arriving girls so I decided to preride the course with Katie on my 4x bike. Although it probably wasn't the most ideal thing for me for to be riding XC with a road cassette on my bike (lots of standing during climbs) at a bike race that I wanted to do really well at, in the end, I was really glad that I got to go. The course was one of the most fun XC race tracks I've ever ridden!

Our club president, Jamie, cooked up some pasta for us all for dinner on Thursday night, and I think we all felt ready to kick off another great Nationals race. The XC race went off early on Friday morning, and although we had a few issues with crappy call ups and some mechanicals we got off to a decent start. At the end of the day, we were 3rd overall to FLC and Lees McCrae, with CSU and a Cal State school close on our heels.

CU Cycling '09 Nationals Team (mostly)

Saturday was a big day ST in the morning and 4x in the afternoon. Blake got our first podium spot in ST and set the stage nicely for 4x in the afternoon. Given that the XC kids were done racing, they got on board with helping to support the gravity racers. We all did our qualifying runs for 4x, and things were looking pretty good. We had 6 of our 7 racers that qualified to race. Even though the race course was way less than ideal, there was some good racing that took place, and in the end we ended up with 2 podium spots. With a less than ideal gate start and a course with little passing opportunities I ended up in 2nd place...honestly a little disappointing, but hey, at least I didn't crash! :)

Racing 4x at Nats

Joey also had a really great day of racing and found his way to the podium in 3rd, on his DH bike no less! At the end of the day, the team found ourselves sitting solidly in 3rd place, but a bit surprisingly...within striking distance of Lees McCrae!!! When we first headed out to Nationals, I was honestly a little bit worried that we might be in danger of not being able to stay in the top 3, so it was pretty exciting to be sitting in a position to maybe move into 2nd with some good DH results the next day.

We all dragged oursleves out of bed early Sunday morning to head up for our DH qualifying runs. The course was in great condition, and everyone put in some solid qualifying runs. It was going to take some super solid efforts from all of us, but beating Lees McCrae was on the radar screen!! Deidre, Brittany, and I headed up to the top of the mountain to get warmed up. I didn't have a spectacular run, by any means, but I didn't crash, and I can't really say why I was so slow, but I ended up in 7th. Luckily Deidre had a great run and got a podium spot, 5th. Next up were the boys, and they decided to run the fastest qualifiers first so people wouldn't be catching some of the slow guys going for the omnium. Joey came across the line WAY ahead of the guy who qualified in first, and nobody even came close to knocking him off the top of the podium! Michael also had a great race and was on the podium in 4th!

The boys all put in a very solid effort and we ended up winning the boy's DH! So, in the end, we put in the efforts that we needed to (boy's DH-1st and girl's DH-2nd), and we just needed Lees McCrae to have a bad men's DH experience....our fingers were crossed! I spent a little bit of time trying to work out the numbers in my head to figure out if we'd made up the difference and finally gave up because it was too complicated without a pen and pencil! haha We headed to awards ceremony, not knowing the results, and found out that we had actually done it!! Lees McCrae's DH boys ended up in 7th, and we ended up sailing past them for 2nd!!

Overall, we had some really good performances from several different people, which makes for a fun team experience. Coordinating all of that for 20 people was a ton of work, and it would have been nice, for at least one year to be able to just be at the race, as a racer, not as a racer, team directory, and nationals coordinator, but so is life, and it's not in the cards for me! Ah well. Collegiate racing was a mixed experience for me. I'm glad that I did it, I met some great people (and some not so great ones, unfortunately), and hopefully I've helped develop some good stuff at CU Cycling that will carry on long past when I've gone!