Second big mountain bike race of the year. Last mountain bike race was at the beginning of March. This race will be much shorter (1:40-2:00) than the Sumter race (my time 3:11), which should suite me a little better, I tend to do better in shorter races rather than longer races. I've also ridden my mountain bike a lot more recently than I had leading up to the Sumter race. So my hopes are pretty high going into the race: I hope to be in the mix for winning the Cat 1 30-39 race, which it's hard to know for sure since I've only done one race, which was a while ago, and much longer than this race.
The first Charlotte Summer Series race was cancelled, due to rain, which was probably turned out to be a good thing for my preparation for this weekend's race so I wouldn't have done a really hard race 3-4 days before Sunday. Last Friday I was able to pre-ride the course, which makes me feel much better going into the race, I know what to expect and learned a few things:
-the start is going to be huge: almost all of the course is narrow singletrack
-drinking from a water bottle is going to be difficult: very few straight flat sections
-it's going to be fast (assuming it's not too muddy): many of the top finishers average over 14mph, which is FAST for a mountain bike race, and I could see why
-with it being so fast, if you're not careful and go out hard you could blow up the second half of the race because you are able to pedal so much
-there's a lot of pretty flat very smooth flowing trail, and then quite a bit of ungulating trails that has some roots, but these sections feel almost separate from each other because they're quite different
-I was also able to see where I should push the pace and where I'll be able to recover some
The first Charlotte Summer Series race was cancelled, due to rain, which was probably turned out to be a good thing for my preparation for this weekend's race so I wouldn't have done a really hard race 3-4 days before Sunday. Last Friday I was able to pre-ride the course, which makes me feel much better going into the race, I know what to expect and learned a few things:
-the start is going to be huge: almost all of the course is narrow singletrack
-drinking from a water bottle is going to be difficult: very few straight flat sections
-it's going to be fast (assuming it's not too muddy): many of the top finishers average over 14mph, which is FAST for a mountain bike race, and I could see why
-with it being so fast, if you're not careful and go out hard you could blow up the second half of the race because you are able to pedal so much
-there's a lot of pretty flat very smooth flowing trail, and then quite a bit of ungulating trails that has some roots, but these sections feel almost separate from each other because they're quite different
-I was also able to see where I should push the pace and where I'll be able to recover some
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