The VT mountain bike race season has traditionally started off with the Flower Power at Catamount Family Center. It’s been going on for forever, but this was only the second year that I’ve done it. Last year we added a singlespeed focus by also making it the Vermont State Singlespeed Supreme Championships.
The format is 5k laps, you can choose how many you want to do. The singlespeed race is 3 laps, or 15k. We had a chance on Friday to head over and preride the course, and it was totally changed from the year before. Way more climbing and some new singletrack sections. About halfway through my preride lap I knew that my 32:20 was not the right gear for me and that course. Yeah, I could ride it but I couldn’t turn the pedals over as quickly as I could with a bit easier gear. So I had to convince George to re-swap out my gearing.
Saturday morning was grey and colder than expected. Turnout for the race was a little slim. The SS men had a nice 15 deep showing, but there were only three women total doing three laps and no other SS women.
I had an okay start and the first lap went by fairly fast and uneventful. On the second lap I crashed on a tight turn into a rock pile, the front end of my bike totally took a dive when I made the turn and I thought it was really odd as I had successfully navigated that turn several times at that point. The crash took the wind out of my sails a bit and my bike was handling really oddly and I was totally discombobulated. There was a girl that was right behind me, and I preferred not to let her pass me so it was a bit of an inner battle to keep struggling through my little issue to stay ahead.
Cruising along in my ill-fitting Bike29 kit with no air in my front tire
At the end of the 2nd lap I finally realized that the reason my bike was handling like crap was because my front tire was nearly flat. That sound I heard on my first lap in the rock section must have been my tire burping and nearly all the air coming out of it. Understanding the problem made it easier to deal with and at some point the girl that was chasing me dropped far enough back that I couldn’t see her anymore.
In the end I finished in 1:02, which was a pretty solid result for me considering the tire problems and was good for the fastest 3-lap womens time. But again, there wasn’t a lot of competition there. We had a lot of Bike29 riders there and between the new kits and the old style ones, we were the dominent team in numbers. I also like that we have all levels of riders represented, from really fast guys to not so fast guys.
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