After a few weeks of testing and training in California my team mate Ryan Condrashoff and I flew out to South Africa for the first round of the World Cup downhill series being held in Pietermaritzburg, neither of us had ever been there before so it was a big learning curve. Pretty soon we found out the places not to go and where to stay clear of after the sun went down!
Our travel didnt end up working out too well and we turned up the afternoon before practice started, that wasnt too bad except that our bikes were missing and we had no idea where we were going! so with the map we got off the world cup website we headed for the track but after about 2 hours of driving we got to where the map said the race was but turns out it definately wasnt there!
so on pure instinct we ended up finding the track about another half hour later.
Luckily our bikes turned up later that evening so we did a quick bike building session and got ready for practice.
The track was really different to anything we usually race on, it started off on a cool steep tech section which quickly flattened out to the point where it actually had a long gradual uphill before it dropped back down into the trees again before jumping out into the 4x track which basically saw it out to the finish line. It was definately the flattest world cup track ive ever seen.
Unfortunately on the Friday morning, qualifying day, I woke up to a nice dose of food poisoning and was quickly in the bathroom throwing up and feeling horrible. I ended up spending the whole day sleeping in the car while Ryan practiced and only managed to get myself out and ready for my qualifying run after eating a total of one piece of toast and a banana the whole day.
I was amazed to actually hold a run together considering it was my first of the day and actually make the top 80 for the finals in 65th.
I had the track pretty sorted so I decided to take Saturdays practice session off so I could rest up and try get some energy back after the food poisoning had hit me.
Race day came around quickly and I felt as ready as I could be to race so after a couple of practice runs in the morning I was excited for finals because I felt like I could pull out a decent result on a track that didnt really suit me.
My race run started off good hitting the first couple of sections good then on basically the last technical spot in the trees i washed out my front wheel at the top of a steep rock face that you had to brake really hard for. With my bike going out from underneith me I had no where to go but over the top and slid down the rock face (which had chicken mesh on it) into more rocks at the bottom then had to climb back up to get my bike. Unfortunately it was all over from that point for me, I got back on and finished my run but id lost too much time during the crash to salvage a good results so I made my way to bottom and finished up 80th of 82 so definately not the way I wanted to start my world cup year but no major injuries from the crash so it was all good.
After 2 days of flying back to the US it was one night in a sort of familiar bed then back on the road to the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey, California. Luckily for me and Ryan we got it easy and got to make our own way down the race in the little red race truck since we had got back the night before.
I was pretty excited for Sea Otter since ive never been before so it was cool to see how big everything was. The race is held at the famous Laguna Seca car racing track so it was awesome to see the actual size of that too but i really just wanted to get a car out there and go for a hot lap!
The DH track at Sea Otter is fairly flat and pedally so everyone on the team ended up racing on our Intense Tracer's, a 6" travel all mountain bike with the new X-Fusion Vengance all mountain fork up front which was being released to the public at the event.
Sea Otter allways has a pretty big media presence which is good because the track has lots of jumps and cool corners to photograph so it was a good chance to get shots of the new X-fusion fork in action so I did probly twice the amount of runs I usually would at a race!
My race went pretty good except for one decent mistake which cost a bit of time but it was a lot of fun and had an awesome spectator turn out which was good to see. I ended up finishing in 32nd which was a bit worse than I expected but I learnt a lot of things that I can take into next year and I think I can pull out a far better result.
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