State Championship MTB

Dave says: I've had a couple days to reflect on what was perhaps the toughest race of the season for me (I guess that's fitting for a state championship race). It was a battle all the way to the end to land a solid third place finish. I traveled up to Solitude the Tuesday before to do the week night race series and preview the course. The result was a mediocre sixth place finish and I feared the worst for the weekend. I decided I needed a strategy change and some extra rest. To compensate for a rough course full of rocks and roots, I raced my full suspension Epic rather than the Scale. The trade off was adding six pounds of extra weight to carry up the longest climb of any ICup race but it was probably worth it.

With a long climb at the beginning, the race blew to pieces fairly quickly and I found myself in a good position holding second place behind Alex Grant. By the very top, I was already dead and Blake Zumbrennen's insane downhill skills proved too much for me to handle. For the remaining three laps I would see him right in front of me at the end of the final climb, only to lose him screaming down the rough singletrack route to the bottom. I almost cracked by the last lap, but held it together for third. It was a good effort that left me not only with sore legs, but also sore arms from the rough stuff and even weird pains in muscles I didn't know that I had. Of course, now that it's over, all that is nothing but a fun memory and I can hardly wait until the next race.