Battle the Bear XC Race Report

My first-ever cross-country mountain bike race. Since I do mostly endurance training I usually don't look forward to the short intense efforts that much. The course was in Bear Creek Lake Park, so I just had to get up and hop on my bike and pedal to the start, that was a real plus of doing this race. I knew the course would be dry and fast; each lap was 10 miles and had 3 climbs totaling maybe 300 feet of elevation gain.

The race started and I was sticking to the back as I didn't know what the pace would be like or how I would feel. Well as soon as we got to the singletrack I regretted this, I was stuck behind a few slow people on the singletrack and passing was difficult at best. We reached the first climb and I was making up spots and since climbing is my forte I was ready to go, but passing was even more difficult, I think I got by two others and that was it. On the back side of the course people finally started to spread out and it was easier to spin away.

During lap 2 I was doing well and felt good, I knew I should've gone harder that first lap, but was new to this XC race business. I opened it up a bit on the second lap and did a lot of passing, most of that was slower traffic from the 50 mile race that was going on as well. Everything went well throughout the race, no mechanicals and the only snafu was turning to go on another lap at the very end instead of going to the finish, I quickly corrected it, but 1 guy(thankfully not in my category, got past me while I veered to the right. The end result....2nd place in my age group. Finish time was 1:26:54, about 1.5 minutes from 1st place. No podium pic as I missed the ceremony while I was eating lunch, oh well. I'm glad I didn't sign up for the one lap beginner race, I would've totally killed and felt like a sandbagging schmuck to boot, sport was much better.