Last weekend was bike-tacular in two ways: I scored my first podium finish in a cross-country bike race, and also spent all of Saturday night on a bike.
Let me 'splain.
Last Saturday was the "First Annual Duthie Hill Dash", a race which took place [appropriately enough] at Duthie Hill Mountain Bike Park, an awesome new bike park that just opened up 30 mins from downtown Seattle. Duthie has a little something for everybody: cross-country trails, "flow" trails with lots of jumps and obstacles, ladders, bridges etc. [This video gives you an idea of the variety of terrain and grin-inducing potential of Duthie.] Before the race, I'd only been there a couple of times before, as part of a class some P529 folks and I took with Simon Lawton, where we spent a bunch of time doing the fast, downhill-y bits over and over again, which ended up coming in pretty handy in the race.
The race course started with a short climb up a gravel road before taking a sharp right turn into single-track; I started off relatively slowly at first because I didn't want to blow up at once, but when it became clear that everybody else was taking it easy too, I decided to get the holeshot into the singletrack and see whether I could clear off. That proved to be a key move for me, because the first bit of singletrack was a downhill section that I railed through fast enough to put a reasonable bit of daylight between me and the rest of the folks in my race. That advantage was further compounded by soon catching up with the folks in the back of the race class that had started before us, and passing them, so I had some "blockers" further slowing down the people behind me. The advantage I pulled out of that first bit was enough to avoid getting caught on the next uphill section, and then there was another downhill section that allowed me to gain some time, and so it went. Of course, it wasn't entirely smooth sailing -- during one climb, a few people caught me and I just let them pass, but overall I was able to hold on to most of my early advantage.
Net result: 3rd in my class, which I celebrated by making my "happy monkey" face.
However, there was no rest for the weary [ie: me] because I'd also signed up to ride in the 2nd annual "9-to-5 Solstice Scavenger Hunt" which was also on Saturday, an all-night event that ran from 9pm to 5am. I did this with 14 other members of the Project 529 crew -- we felt we were honor-bound to compete given our team's tagline of "We work 9-to-5 so we can ride 5-to-9". We split up into 3 teams: the cross-country team [which I was on], the downhill team, and a "Girl Power" team consisting of all the P529 ladies, and off we went. Notable bits of the night include:
- Spending an hour looking for a friggin' statue of a man on horseback near the Woodland Park Zoo, and failing miserably. Oh, and if you were wondering, riding through Woodland Park at night, by yourself, is pretty creepy.
- Riding out to West Seattle. As it turns out, that's friggin' far away. From anywhere.
- Periodically coming across other teams also participating in the scavenger hunt; it was strangely bracing to see other people on bikes at 3am engaging in the same insanity
- Trying to look inconspicuous while prying up road turtles [those little reflector/lane boundary markers]
- Deciding whether we wanted a grave rubbing badly enough to climb over a cemetery fence topped with barbed wire. Additional disincentive: the fence looked like it was designed to keep people [or things] in the cemetery, rather than keep people out. We ended up wussing out on that one.
- Hearing about the guy sleeping in a dumpster next to Krispy Kreme who was getting extremely pissed off because people kept disturbing his sleep by opening up his dumpster looking for a Krispy Kreme cup [which was one of the items we were supposed to get].
Final statistics: about 35 miles covered, and 218 points accumulated, which put us 10th out of 23 teams. The downhill team came in 5th and the P529 ladies came in 15th. Overall, a lot of fun, and definitely something I'd do again.
