Team MotionBased

I just got back from the 2nd longest down hill race in the country with a crew of 6 WTB racers. The race started at the top of Mt. Ashland and raced back to town. The course had about 700’ of climbing 5000’ of descent, and had all kinds of terrain from wide open fired road to super tight my bars don’t fit single track. The team (Jason Moeschler and his almost wife, Henry O’Donnell, Kirk Desmond, Anthony Medaglia, Jiro Nakamura, and me) all packed up early Friday morning and headed up north for some good times, good people and great trails. Well we got all of those, the cycling community in Ashland greets us with open arms and are stoked that we make the trip. The races are really grassroots up there and you can tell that riding the bike and having fun is priority number one. When we arrived in Ashland the first thing we did was check into the Hostel. That’s right! I said hostel, it's cheep and a good way of keeping everyone together, I mean really close together maybe to close. The one rule we did have was no open flames indoors because with all that gas the place will blow for sure. The cool thing is that it is next door to the UBI so you get all kinds of cycling people and everything in town is just a bike ride away. Once we got settled, we did a couple of runs then came back eat some food and worked on bike set up for Saturdays practice. Tires seemed to be the talk around the parking lot and everyone had their own ideas. The trails in Ashland have every kind of ground you can think of hard pac to lome and even a bunch of sand so no tire would work perfect everywhere. Once that was figured out it was time for bed with an early morning wake up only hours away to practice the course. After running the course a couple of times we came back worked on bikes some more and then hooked up with the UBP guys for dinner at great organic pizza place with live music and talked more bikes. Race day: Sunday was a 9:30am start at the top of Mt Ashland 6500’ with 1 minute intervals and snow drifts for the first mile of the race that had proved very tricky and caused many people to slap. Jiro was 1st up then Anthony, Henry, Nathan Riddle (local fast guy), me, Jason and Kirk a full on WTB train on pain. Everyone was thinking the same thing. Man I hope I don’t get reeled in by my minute man! With Jason behind me with the XC bike I was nervous, Damn those high posters… The race started with about 5 minutes of high speed double track then had about an 8 minute climb that seemed to go on for ever. After the climb it hit some classic High Sierra single track and just kept dropping from there. It feels so weird to ride on trails this nice. Some of the trails look like Tams best offerings and you can ride them all day long. The finish of the race was in Lithia Park in town. I had the goal of catching the local hero Nathan on the climb but all I got was clouds of dust I could never get close enough to see its maker. The dust has a way of making you ride well over your head which almost was my dismissal from the race. I had about 300 yards to go and one tricky turn that I forgot about. The trail is about 8” wide with a high speed kink in it before it drops on to the fire road and shoots you to the finish. I missed the high speed kink and launched off the trail and dropped 10’ to the fired without my bike, like a Pezz dispenser I collected a mouth full dirt and I’m not talking a few kernels of dirt I’m talking a hungry burrito size bite. It was a mouth full. I lost my glasses ripper off my visor and the worse thing was I dirty up my cool WTB skin suit. I ended up getting back on my bike and crossing the finish line with only 27 seconds to spare. I had won. Thanks To Ashland and Break Away events for having such a great race that represents everything mountain biking is. Check out my race on MotionBased, and here's a look from Google Earth. Results 1st me (WW 2.55 LT FR) 2nd Nathan Riddle (Mutano 2.4) 3rd Jason (WW 2.3 k) 4th Henry (WW 2.3 FR) 5th Kirk (WW 2.55 LT FR) 6th Anthony (WW 2.5 ft, Nano 2.1 FR Rear) 7th Jiro (WW 2.3 k)