Yup, last night was the last Buck Hill race. Earlier in the season we were lead to believe it would be the last buck hill race forever, but they announced last night that they will be back there next year. So I guess the development didn't kill all the trails.
It was a sad buck hill season for me, I made it to the first race and the last race, that's it. My schedule just wasn't working out well, and I was out of town on a lot of Thursdays. Not to mention the "incident" the first race soured me a little and I didn't really feel like racing for a while.
Last night was great though. Perfect weather, lots of people and me on a brand new 29'er. I knew I wasn't going to be doing anything special in terms of actually riding fast, so I started back a bit and went out at a pretty reasonable pace. I hooked up with the Freidell bro's for a lap, then once it thinned out I decided I couldn't stand riding behind Gary's bright green IF spandex shorts, so I picked it up on the climb. Next I got in with Deanwood. We rode most of the race together and I was feeling pretty good. Unfortunately my seatpost wasn't quite tight and I could feel it slipping starting on the second lap. I thought I'd just ride it out, but man was it getting low by the third lap. Deanwood was kind enough to offer a wrench (since I hadn't brought any tools) and I stopped to make a quick adjustment halfway through lap 3. It had dropped about 2", so I made the corrections and was on my way about a minute back from where I was. I could see Deanwood in front of me, but just didn't have much left to bridge the gap, so I decided to just keep things comfortable and finish out the race without killing myself (which I did just fine). All in all a good race.
It was only me second real ride on the new 29'er and I wasn't totally sure how those tires were going to like buck. I've got the Crow's from stans on there and they're crazy light. Super fast on the climbs and accelerations, but how would their baldness they take the sandy singletrack? Turns out, not too bad. Yes, they'll drift in sand and on high-speed corners, but for the most part they hooked up very well at the 30 psi I was running. Don't think I'd want to ride really rough stuff with them, but for the relatively smooth stuff they're grrrrrreat!
In other news, we were out of town for the past week out in Oregon (my apologies for anyone trying to contact me recently). We drove out with a couple of friends, which made for a lot of car-time. 27 hours each way roughly. The friends we traveled with were heading to a wedding out on the coast and we wanted to visit two sets of friends in the Corvallis area. We all spent a day or so in Portland, which was fun since Beth hadn't seen the city before. Then we headed down the coast and eventually our friends dropped us off in Corvallis for a few days.
It was great catching up with our friends out there all of which we hadn't seen since our wedding. Both sets of friends had new babies within the last 4 weeks, so there were new faces to meet as well!
We happened to be traveling though the same weekend as the Davinci days festival in Corvallis, so we had to check it out. The main focus of the festival is what they call Kinetic Sculpture Racing. Basically people build crazy human powered vehicles that have to complete in 4 stages of racing: a 10 mile road race, a sand pile climb, a mud bog run, and a 1 mile journey down the river! Not only do these vehicles have to traverse all these things, they have to do it with style, there's an artistic portion to the judging as well. Some of these contractions obviously had massive amounts of labor put into them, probably years of work, they were impressive to say the lease. Others needed some improvement, but at least the people operating them were having fun!
The one thing that was evident is that I must partake in this event in the near future. I was chock full 'o ideas all weekend of what I could do really make one of these thing fly, I won't say any more though, as I don't want to spoil it!
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