Super D wrap up

I'm pretty much done with race season, so I took a week off bloggy this thing. But I gotta tie up the loose ends on the Ohiopyle Super D race.

Everybody I talked to on race day had a blast. And Ohiopyle finally has a mountain bike race. Win.

The course was just right for a Month of Mud series race. Not too scary, long enough to avoid pissing off the XC folks, and still a different experience from a regular cross country race. It sounds like it's going to stay in the series.

Unfortunately for me, I flatted on my home course. Even more unfortunately, I lost to Don Powers by two seconds. He'll never let me forget it.

Most of the gnarly boys and girls didn't come out to play. We had about 35 show up for practice the day before. But they thought the course was too much pedaling, so they didn't come back for the race the next day. Understandable I suppose. A 45 minute Super D does have more pedaling than a two minute downhill at Seven Springs.

There were a few people that called it a regular XC race. I don't know about them, but I've never gotten to ride a bus to the top of a mountain in an XC race.

The course ended up being  2,138 feet down and 624 feet up over 9 miles. Here's the gps file. We went from the highest point in the park to the lowest. It was a long and mellow, but it was still a Super D.

That said, there's room for improvement. The long field section sucked. The gravel road section of McCune sucked. The go-arounds on the hard lines weren't long enough, and the hard lines weren't hard enough. And to be honest, Sugarloaf isn't the best downhill in the park. It just happened to flow the best for a race course.


Now that we have the logistics of getting bikes up the mountain, I'm hoping we can do a steeper and more technical race this spring. That would be a course that's 15-20 minutes long, almost entirely downhill, and full of big rocks. But if we want to do that, we (I) need to get cracking on a new trail. The terrain is there, it just needs raked off and mapped out.

And in the far far away future, it looks like Pittsburgh is invading the Breck Epic SS class next year. Oh yes. I pitched the idea of an East Side vs. West Side vs. The Big Belligerent Canadian points competition to MikeMac. It sounds like that's a go. Now I need to figure out a way to get there.