saSSy girls racin' @ Stone Temple 8

One more race popped up this season. With the thought of trying to keep up my fitness for as long as possible I decided to race the Stone Temple 8.

When i originally signed up - I thought it was a xc race and then i realized that it was an 8(!) hour race. I figured i could probably suffer through an 8 hour race but didn't really want to - so I went on the hunt for a partner. i asked Jessica if she wanted to race and after a couple of days of deliberation she said "yes!".

Of course she asked me if I was racing singlespeed (because that's pretty much all she rides is a 29er SS) and I said "uh..no...wasn't planning on it". But then when thinking up team names the only thing i could think of was "sassy girls" and I thought "saSSy" would be much cooler than "sassy" but that meant I had to ride the rigid SS. I like the name so much I agreed to ride singlespeed.

Saturday morning at 5am rolled around WAY too soon but i got up and headed to Jessica's to pick her up - we were on the road by 6am on Saturday morning. It took around 2 hours to get there and we had plenty of time to take a photo and for Jessica to get ready. She was going to go first.

i must say - Jessica is looking pretty saSSy here

off on the first lap
go jessica go!

I definitely got the better end of the deal with Jessica as a partner. She's way stronger than me and fast as heck. That was proven when she was the 3rd female to come through on the 1st lap under the 1 hour mark. uh..oh..that meant I had to bust ass as hard as possible to not negate her effort.

The course was very technical...lots of fun little rock techy sections, with some power moves, finesse moves and a few rock drops - definitely suites my riding style but i must admit it was still pretty rough on the rigid SS. I rode as fast as I could and my first lap was in the 1:04ish range.

photos from the event photographer - Action Photographic
(yes - I ordered and paid for prints of these photos - just haven't received them yet)

After about 30 minute after my lap - I checked results and was shocked to find we were in 1st place with 11 minutes over 2nd place. hmm....

Jessica came in faster on her 2nd lap with a sub-1 hour lap time. damn...sadly that wasn't the case for me. Even tho I felt pretty good and much smoother on my 2nd lap - I was ~3 minutes slower on my second lap.

Even with me slowing down a bit - i checked the results and we were 24(!) minutes up on 2nd place. wow!

Jessica came in again at just under an hour and I went out. I was feeling pretty tired on my 3rd lap and I struggled on the techy bits and walked a few of the power moves I had cleaned earlier. I tried to minimize my slowing down and came in 4 minutes slower than my 2nd lap. not too bad I guess...

I checked results we were 45 minutes up. dang! that's crazy - I thought "if i don't screw things up we could win this thing"

Around 10 minutes before Jessica came in for her 4th lap - I found out that the 2nd place team went out for their 7th lap at 4:30 - so that meant all Jessica had to do was finish her 4th (which would be our team's 7th lap) and we had 1st place wrapped up and I didn't have to go out for the 8th lap.

But our goal was to do 8 laps and so when Jessica came in after an 1:01 lap at around 4:45pm(we had until 5:15 to go out on our final lap) - I went out. I was pretty cooked at this point and I tried to take it easy. After riding the rigid for 3 laps - the 4th lap was rough. My upper body was tired, my brain was tired and my reaction times were poor and a took a couple of hard diggers. But I finished and we won by a really big margin.

Let me tell you - winning doesn't suck. Of course it was Jessica who set the bar and all i had to do was hold my own.

podium shot
(well kinda - i was off getting a band-aid for my knee when we got called up)

thanks to my partner...hopefully I can convince her to team up with me again!

my part of the swag!