Crashing again.... Marysville Race Report

I raced the Marysville enduro last year as my first endurance race ever and came back for more.  Held on a private farm in PA a mere 1.5 hours from Baltimore, the course is a 7.5 mile loop of almost all singletrack with a sneaky amount of climbing, a bunch of tight technical sections and more than it's fair share of unramped logs.  We camped for the weekend so I could race the Friday Night Time trial and the short track on Sunday as part of the PAValleys.com Festival Weekend.  The vibe is a good one - lots of the MASS gang and some really fast cyclists thrown in the mix.  Great area for camping plus a lot of things that make a race nice - (cold) showers with curtains, loads of port-o-pots, two big sound systems, two kegs, a pond and a stream for swimming, etc.  Lots of teams brought their families and kids.

Night time trial:  My first time riding at night, ever.  Lights on the bars and helmet. 

This is the only part of the weekend I'd like to have back - I definitely left some minutes out there in my tentativeness.  The course is 3.5 miles of pretty true singletrack.  Pretty wild racing at night - eerie and lonely.  I got passed by the winning duo team, who started nearly 5 minutes back, but otherwise was out alone the whole time.  Finished 4th out of the solo women.

Enduro:  It was frickin' hot on Saturday.  I did better with nutrition and hydration than at Iron Hill or the Stoopid, aided by a fully stocked pit and a pit crew who lubed my chain when I was gulping coke (thanks Shea!).  A spare water bottle every lap for dumping over my head certainly helped.  Heed, Cerasport, margarita shot blocks, and PBnJ were the calories of the day. 


I started solid, even doing a couple of proper cross dismounts on a few of the ~8 times per lap I was off my bike.  I was into my endurance pace by the second lap when I started crashing.  Now, I haven't crashed a ton this year in races, but I might have made up for it on Saturday.

• I crashed on a switchback.  
• Several laps later I crashed on the same switchback.  
• I laid the bike down (and myself) in the gravel road at the bottom of a steep downhill.  
• I crashed over a log.  
• I rode off the side of the downhill on a big log-over. 
• I clipped my handlebars on more than one tree and got misdirected into the woods...  

Not much worse for the wear, but I'm sore and used some new-skin on Saturday night to patch up.  And a bit of beer.

After about the 3rd lap, the other women similar in speed had separated a bit, and it was just me and some guys.  Lap after lap.  I was on pace to put in 7 laps and did. And I hit my average lap time even on lap 6, so maybe I'm starting to figure this endurance stuff out.  6th for the day behind some very experienced ladies.

Short track:  An early morning thunderstorm woke us early, but I went back to sleep until nearly 9.  Short track wasn't until 11:30, but there was slow downhill racing and huffy tossin' to watch in the interim.

My legs felt a little tight, but my butt and banged-up knee were not at all happy with the idea of getting on a bike again for 30 minutes of all out effort.  It felt great, though.  We raced all at once, so I got to knock elbows with the guys, and got taken out by one on a tight pass.  I thought I was third, holding off Nicole during the last lap by digging deeper.  The women's leader lapped me at the end of the race - but then when results went up I saw that actually one of the fast chicks was behind me the whole time and I was 2nd from the start.  It was nice to end the weekend with a podium in one of the stages.

I wound up 4th in the GC.  Prizes only went to the top 3, which I would say was the only bummer of the weekend.  It's an expensive weekend as races go and for the solos I was expecting they might fill the field out a bit.  But super worth it.  I'm in for next year if anyone else wants to join us for some rassin', campin', beer drinkin' fun.  Shea might look for a relay partner - turns out I'm too stubborn for that relay stuff just yet.