Snowflake recap and Week 14

[OVMTB]

Race #3 of the ACA series is in the books, and was definitely worthy of a renaming from "Snowflake Secret Trails" to "Rock Feature Bonanza and Nowhere to catch your breath but plenty of wind"....

For the record, I think it's a great course and presents our riders with a new level of challenges that the other races don't.  The middle school course had several rock climbs and drops with lots of twisty sections and two distinct hillclimb sections.  The high school course added even more difficult rock steps, ledges, and drops, plus a few very narrow 'side hill' trails that had my FULL attention when pre-riding.  Some of our riders loved the loads of technical areas, while some didn't appreciate it as much. 

Luckily Sunday morning forgot to bring the wind and it turned into a beautiful day for racing. Our great parents dove in and got the pit zone setup in short order.  The middle schoolers took to the course and managed a clean race earning a podium position in every single category for a total of 6 podiums! 

While this course is spectator friendly, it isn't particularly "spectator easy" and our parents found themselves putting in some great efforts climbing and descending the hillsides to watch their riders on course during the race. The day continued with the high schoolers cranking out some fast laps, with a few occasional tests of Newton's 1st and 3rd laws of motion. In true OVMTB fashion, everyone gave it their best effort and several even left a little skin out there. It's inspiring to watch our riders push to the levels that they do on a course as difficult as this one. By the end of the day, our high schoolers had totaled up 8 podium positions.  CDO had a great showing and held onto their 2nd place in Division 1 team points.  The Division 2 team points race was really tight, and OV composite slipped to 5th, only 4 points behind 4th, and 29 points behind 3rd.  As they say, that's racing, and we'll keep pushing to see if we can get them back at McDowell!  Thanks again to all of our coaches and parents who helped out to make this yet another successful weekend. It may or may not mean a whole lot, but I'm pretty proud of OVMTB as a whole- Riders, Coaches, and Parents.  We're definitely something to write home about.

Our next race is at McDowell mountain park near Fountain Hills, AZ.  The race is on Saturday Oct 18,  so we'll do the pre-ride at 4:30pm Friday evening.  More details to follow in next week's email.

See you all at practice this evening!

Ryan

  

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Ryan McCoskey

OVMTB Head Coach

www.ovmtb.org