Visit PA MTB Festival...

This weekend was the Visit PA MTB festival weekend. Since I had some time off earlier in the month for a family visit, I was unable to get some extra time off to suffer the 9 hr endurance race with my friends.

I did however get to spend some time at the farm on Friday night for the Night Time Trial. This event is really cool, with the Visit PA team riders starting at 9pm and everyone else going out at 1 minute intervals. I had a chance to pre-ride the course with VeganRob, DanK, Pete, Scott Alden while it was still light (or almost). We finished up at just before 9pm, without lights and it was pretty dark in some of the sections. Our pre-ride data showed 6.37 miles and a kinda easy pace of 48 minutes.

Since I had determined late I was gonna race, I had the 2nd to last start time of 10:38pm. I had heard some times of the fast guys A-ron of 34'ish minutes. I felt really good out on the course, passing about 7 or 8 people that started before me. I finished in 38:23 - 6th place in the solo field, I'm happy with my ride there.

I returned back to the farm on Saturday night to do some partying with everyone, who suffered out there all day. They had great weather for the endurance race, though not as great as the weather in my comfortable office with fast internet :)

Sunday's events were some slow downhill race, kid's race, bike toss, and short track xc. Seems a lot of people didn't stay around for the Sunday festivities. Because of the attendence, Kuhn did just 3 STXC races, with no A, B categories. We started at 12:30 for our 30 minutes on the course. The leaders did 13 laps, and I did 12 laps - ending up in 12th place. The speeds were really fast, 7.5 miles in 30:22.

After cleaning up and sticking around for some raffle drawings- I won a Feedback Sport Alpine digital scale. I hope to get out to either the Lewis Morris Challenge (where I won in Sport last year) or Long Pine Classic (michaux state forest). It might also be time to start getting ready for the W101?? I've been considering this race this year for a few weeks, we'll see how that works out. The 2-5-10 century is coming up and I'm gonna try to get that Monday off of work to do it.

Time for some sleep. Later

-matt