Crosstoberfest-ID State Champs

This weekend we made the drive over to Sun Valley for the ID State Cross Championships. The weather was perfect, the course was over-the-top technical and we ate at Ketchum Burrito every day we were there. Perfect equation for a great weekend of racing.

The course definitely favored mountain bikers or at least people with very good bike handling skills. It was a maze of singletrack, chicanes, technical off camber turns, steep uphills and stupid-steep downhills that sent you straight into a set of barriers. I loved it!

Singletrack by the river. Soooo pretty!

Saturday was far more stressful for me than Sunday's race. They started the women among 40-50 or so men in the B group which made for a really chaotic start. There was a huge pileup right in front of me at the beginning, which I narrowly averted, and the first lap was incredibly slow. There was so much single track and so few opportunities to pass, I had a really hard time catching up to Kris Walker, who had a front row start (I was about 4 rows deep). I made a bunch of sketchy passes and finally caught her at the beginning of the second lap. I put in about a 10 second gap on her for a while, but she caught back on about 40 min. into the race. We were riding together out of a single track section...and I got a flat. Bummer. I was able to get a wheel, but by the time I got back on my bike, Kris got a minute on me and I had to settle for second.

Comin' in hot!

Sunday was the State championship race, so they changed the course to include a heinous run up. Although I never once looked at my watch, I think it was at least a 45 second hike/run up the beginning of the ski hill, to a sharp turn down a super-steep downhill on washboarded gravel. Yikes. That run-up was the definition of pain and suffering.

The women got organized before Sunday's race and decided to give ourselves our own start wave, 30 seconds after the men. Call ups were going to be based on the previous day's results, but according to how you finished among the men. As we were racing for the state championships against women, it just didn't seem fair to shove some of us 6 rows deep and others on the front row. Our start plan didn't really help the congestion at the start, as we ran into all the men immediately on the run up at the start of the lap, but at least it made it a fair start for everyone.

Ouch. 58 min of ouch.

I managed to suffer my way up the run-up in first and by the time I got to the bottom of the downhill, I had already put in a big gap on the field. I held the gap and increased it each lap and managed to keep enough air in my tires (believe me, it was barely enough) to finish a minute up with the Idaho State Champ. title. It's a rare day when your legs feel strong, your bike works and it all comes together, so I was a very happy lady!

I think I was running this barrier as if it hadn't been knocked down.

Nate, as always, was super-mechanic for the group of us from Victor. Believe me, he had his hands full. We had 6 flats between 4 of us racing, Troy broke his chain in the first race on his A bike, then flatted on his B bike, Bergy got 2 flats in Sunday's race, and I flatted on my cool down on the bike path after I won my race on Sunday. Did I mention how technical the course was?

We finished up with beers at the after party and of course, topped it off with another round of burritos at KB before the drive home. And, because Nate and I finally had another person in our car for the ride home, we stopped in Carey, Idaho and made Bergy take a picture of us that we talk about taking every time we go to Sun Valley. You can't really see us, but you can see the important part: