Its been a long road to recovery with my
injury this year and with it being over the racing season forcing me to miss
pretty much a full season of DH racing. I decided to race the Enduro at
Eastridge mainly as a gage of fitness agents other riders and also because a
lot of the stages where old downhill tracks and it would be great to see how I
felt riding agents the clock again.
As this was the first Enduro I had done it
was a new format for me. Basically you get the Saturday to ride the full course
and practice all the stages ready for Sunday. The hard things is that you only
really get time to do one run on each stage because by the time you have road
all the stages and road between each one it a good three hours of riding you
your pretty tired by the end of the day. I tried to take it as easy as possible
on the Saturday and save as much energy as possible for the Sundays racing. I
did stop and look at a few of the more technical and tricky sections so I new
exactly where I was going there.
For the seeing run on Saturday afternoon I
found my self very nervous as the start. I was surprised at this because it
wasn’t a downhill race but I know when you hear those beeps my mind just goes
in to the same mode ready to give it everything. I had a clean seeding run and
finished in 14th. This was
great start to the weekend but I knew I would have my work cut out as this was
a very downhill orientated stage and the where more fitness based ones to come.
Come Sundays and my body was feeling
surprisingly good. I set of for stage one feeling confident and nervous as to
what was to come. I found that I really settled in to the grove of each race
stage and was really enjoying myself. I soon found myself at the last stage
excited to get down to the finish as this was my favorite stage. I had another
clean run and managed to knock six seconds of my previous time from seeding and
giving me the 3rd fastest time of the final stage. This was a great
feeling as has given me confidence in my ability to push and makeup time when
it really matters and shows I’m moving in the right direction. I finished 13th
overall on the day. I am going get back on the Mondraker Summum downhill bike
this week witch is really exciting as I have been longing to swing my leg over
this beauty for a wile now.
