Swayback

Well, I finally got around to my first MTB race of the year and was stoked. I had Matt and Andrew over from Hattiesburg, MS for the weekend and we all were looking forward to an awesome time. We went down to Swayback on Saturday after riding Oak Mtn on Friday for a preride of the course with Omar and Josh. After a good lap preride we were good to go and looking forward to the Sunday morning race.

Luckily the B'ham weather man/men were wrong again as to when the storms would hit our area and down in Wetumpka where the race was held. Weather turned out to be perfect by the 10:40am race time. I was looking forward to a good "base race" with at least a top 5 out of 18 for my sport/cat 2 class.

I enter the woods 5th and got caught up on most of the 1st lap behind the 4th place rider that I eventually passed (after I scrubbed his wheel 3 times) with 1 mile left on the 8.7 mile first lap. Turned a 0:41:52 on the 1st lap and now right on the 3rd place rider 2 miles into the 2nd lap. Then, I start hearing that dreaded "hissing" sound and yep......flat......good ole pinch flat. I new I had taken a bad line. My mojo is drained and I jump off the bike and get the tube changed out and realize that a 16 gram c02 cartridge only puts about 10lbs of pressure in a 29in tube. So, I wound up cruising around in the woods for 6 miles almost on the rim and an 11th place finish out of 18.

Legs/endurance felt good. Lessons learned........switching to tubeless tires this week!