The Maine Mayhem!

Part 2

Ok, it's now obvious that a proper race report just isn't going to happen so it's abridged report time. When the bike portion of the race rolled around, I took an assessment of the folks at the line and decided that my teammate Anders, Steve and a couple of college age looking kids (see how old I am now? college KIDS???) were my most likely competition so the best strategy was to try to get out to an early lead and hold onto it. I THOUGHT I had only a 14 second deficit to Anders and roughly 2:00 to Steve so this shouldn't be too bad. Maybe, with luck on my side, I'll pull off the overall.

the annual berm shot

At the start I gunned it and took the holeshot going into the woods (usually very important here since the single track is so tight and it's hard to pass) and quickly took a 10-15 second lead. At that point I couldn't help but think that this was going to be easy. Those thoughts were erased when the lead feeling crept into my legs and Anders easily bridged up after passing one of the young-ins. Anders and I rode together for the first two laps and I got nervous because he didn't seem to be having any trouble staying on my wheel and his full suspension was definitely an advantage on the really rooty sections of the course.

my brother, out of retirement, on the berm

 my buddy Tim did his first ever race.  He won his age

 category but lost in the number attachment category.

Going into the third of four laps, I decided it was time to see if I could get away so as soon as we lapped through I drilled it for about 5 minutes and was awarded a 30-ish second lead over Anders. From there I just tried to keep the pace up and eventually finished around 1:30 up on Anders and 10 minutes on Steve (haven't seen the actual results posted yet) and thought I had the overall in the bag.

Unfortunately, as Anders and I were chatting we realized that we didn't know how they were tabulating the overall. I thought it was based on overall time, he thought it was based on finishing positions but, in reality, it was based on your run time + your average lap time from teh bike race! Some quick math in the head lead us to believe that the overall would be very close between the three of us. In the (anticlimactic here but very exciting there) I nabbed the overall by 1.5 seconds and scored myself all sorts of bragging rights and a sweet Columbia waterproof jacket valued (so the tag says) at $350. Not bad for a $16 entry fee!

Steve waiting for the final results.  

I offered to settle it with an arm wrestling competition.  

(glad he didn't take me up on it)

Anders being all stoic.  He'd look even

more stoic in a nice new jacket...