Day 3: Ute Valley Pro XCT Race

Today was one of the two major ride days that the camp was looking forward to- the cross country race.  The next big day will be the last day of camp where we will do a shuttle run up to 10,000 ft and ride back to town.  We ended up lucking out with the weather- they were calling for a 50% chance of showers, which as I'm told here in Colorado Springs means that your buddy could be standing next to you with rain pouring on him, and you can be bone dry.  So it was anybody's game.

We had 5 riders who were racing early at 9:15, so they were up early and rolling up to the course first thing in the morning with Doug, one of the coaches.  I rode up later in the morning with Kip, another coach, to bring the rest of the riders up for the 11:00 start.  We had a nice mellow ride up the bike paths and road to get to the venue.  Again, I like these easy rides as it affords great opportunities to get some photos.

One we arrived at the venue we grabbed our race numbers, then each rider went through their warm ups and pretty soon we were off and racing.  The conditions amazingly had changed from even the day before- one of our earlier riders had told us that the course got a lot more sandy and a lot of the corners were really loose- so that was some great recon work that the later racers really benefited from
Short of doing a full blown race report lets just say that it was fast and everyone was pretty happy with how they ended up.  Nobody had any major mechanical issues and nobody got hurt.  I got a chance to race my age group as well and the race was a lot of fun.  All together the race took 1 hour 12 minutes- way too short for me- I only started to feel really good about 40 minutes in.  I'm not really too concerned, as racing today was just an excuse to ride my bike and I had no major aspirations with this event.

Afterwards everyone was pretty smoked.  We definitely enjoyed being able to just relax and have lunch right there.  Unfortunately soon we started to notice a change in the skies.  Because the coaches are local and they know the weather, they knew that we were in for something, so instead of hanging out all afternoon then riding back, we took off before the Pro Women's race, showered back at the college, then drove up to watch the Pro Men's race.  Somewhere in this time frame is when the skies opened up and we got a 20 minute downpour.  No big deal for us, we were done racing/riding and were just there to enjoy the afternoon.  But the poor Pro Women's field got nailed by the storm.  Since Ute Valley has a lot of sand when it rains the first 1/2" gets muddy, and it turns to CAKE.  As we were walking the course I kept wondering why I felt like I was stepping on something.  Basically the top layer of mud sticks to whatever goes over it (shoes, tires) and peels up from the dry sand under neath.  Very happy none of our racers had to ride through that.

We finished the afternoon with watching the Pro Men's race, cheering them through one of the toughest technical sections of the course (will upload video at some point once I get the hang of that whole editing thing).  Back to campus for dinner then had a quick talk on bike maintenance and packing bikes for traveling.  That ran a little over and everyone was already falling asleep, so there was really no need for the yoga session after that, so that'll get bumped to a later date.

Ryan Trebon taking the Pro Men's win- high fives all the way to the finish.

Tomorrow is going to be hot, so we'll be doing our long ride in the morning before it gets super super hot.  It'll be a big climbing day, supposed to climb up to 8500 ft (currently at ~6200) and hit some of the best trails in town.  In the afternoon we'll do more skills- playing around on a pump track and practicing some trail specific bike handling skills.