Today was the first mountain bike race of the season. The BuDu series opener. It was held at South Seatac Park. I decided to race my geared bike since the weather was looking to be OK. As such I did expert. The morning started out with me taking photo's of the beginners race and not paying attention to the time. I asked someone the time and found out it was 10 minutes till my race start. Panic run to the car to get ready and zip over to the start line. As such I was neither warmed up nor did I have my tire pressure setup correctly and I forgot to start my polar. My early morning pre-ride showed 4.1 miles for the loop so the 4 laps we were going to do would make for a decent 16.4 mile race. But the pre-ride at a mellow pace took 25 minutes and the whole race was advertised to be an hour long. Hmmmm. So off we went. I had a good start and was in the lead group of 5 riders for the first part of lap one but then I felt my rear getting really loose in the corners. Too low a pressure in the tire. This was my first race on tubeless tires and I burped it. So I pulled off and got some air in and it held fine for the rest of the race but I was now passed by EVERYONE. So I decided to ride really hard and see how many racers I could pass. I turned myself inside out and began to catch and pass many racers. I felt like I wanted to die! It was a tough little course which each loop seeming much longer than 4.1 miles. I finally got close to Cosmic, a great rider, and then proceeded to be held off for the last two laps by 5 seconds. Couldn't catch his wheel. It was killing me! So finishing the race I quickly changed and went back to filming and picture taking until Molly was finished. I then went and looked at the results page and it showed that I beat Cosmic. Cosmic and I talked to the race organizers and they were stumped. So instead of moving Cosmic up in front of me, they moved me down behind him. They had no clue. There were many other errors seen such as my wife being in the men's category and a 30-39 women being in the 40+ category. Since I'm not doing the entire BuDu series due to conflicts I'm not overly concerned about this but it is a bummer and since I forgot to start my watch I couldn't argue either way. I hope they figure out a better way to score rather than the manual paper method they use. So I either had an hour 20 or and hour 24 depending on which time is correct. Lost a minute or two fixing the tire so if I did have a 1:20 time without the flat I would have ended up around 3rd to 5th. It was a fun time though due to the fact that the morning rain left and we had 63 degree dry weather. A teaser for spring!
UPDATE: Deanna from BuDu called me to let me know that she found out the issue with the results and they have now been corrected. I'm very impressed how tenaciously she worked to find a correct the error. Good news was the hour 20 was the correct time.
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