Race Report

I’m pulling another one of my famously late race reports. In fact this time I’ve got three to catch up on, so if you’re in the mood – you can fill your boots with some serious updating.

I’ve got to back it up quite some time back to my PNWMA off-road race in Kamloops, B.C. It was the first one of the season as far as the series goes, as well as for me. I had been able to blow my cobwebs out on the roadrace bike, and doing some recreational off-roading, but this was my first green flag on the dirty bike.

This particular event is a bit unique in the sense that it’s a big off-road loop but incorporates the motocross track for a portion of a lap. I thought I’d get the jump on everyone (literally) by going out to the moto track a few days early and making sure I could clear a bunch of the critical jumps on the track. I actually had a great time riding the course, but ended up pounding myself in the whoop section and giving myself a pretty good hipper. I was hobbling around for the next few days leading up to the event, but figured it was worth it cause I had most of the track dialled (including the whoops, which I later made into my bitches).

The morning of the event they let you take a pre-ride lap. Well, turns out they reconfigured the course so that we took portions of the moto track backwards, and only used portions of it. I wasn’t stoked to learn that the wincing pain in my hip I was enduring while pulling my gear on was all for not.

Turns out pretty much the entire lap was either grass track that was semi whooped out, scabbed together moto track where you had to take off on the landings and jump down the take-offs, or seriously whooped out single track in the trees. I’m thinking “holy crap” this is a recipe for arm pump.

I take the green flag and immediately start just railing guys. I moved up through to the front of my class by about ¾ the way round the first lap; just in time for everything to start going wrong. I lost the front going through a very loose off-camber 2nd gear turn and stalled the bike. The RMZ-250 is built for moto, and not so much for off-road. Since it’s critical in moto to never tag neutral in the shift to second they’ve cut the selector cog in the shift mechanism so that it takes a very careful feel to get the bike into neutral. Well, what that means to the off-roader (since that’s coupled with the fact that you can’t start it in gear) is that you have to spend some time finding neutral prior to being able to flash it back up – quite some time. I ended up with 4 of my 9 laps being affected by me furiously kicking my bike trying to start it on the side of the trail. You can imagine the party going on inside my helmet as my competitors are rolling past!

My good lap times were right there with the guys running in the top 5, so it was disappointing to get shafted with a poor finish. I also wished the race was longer. For the last couple laps I was going through the whooped out fields on the rear wheel in 4th gear while flying past guys rolling them in 3rd. I almost got to where I just felt stronger and stronger as the race wore on.

In the end I scored out finishing in 13th out of 32. I was actually surprised to see that I was in the top half of the finishing order. I guess those 4th gear whooped sections made a little difference for me.