Winter Park Series Race #3 Report

Yesterday was my second adventure at the low key and super fun Winter Park Race Series for this season. Like 2 weeks ago a few big names decided to show up and show us where it's at with Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski blasting to the win 2 minutes ahead of Michael Broderick. Those guys were cruising!

My race went amazingly well and I was surprised at the legs I had, especially during the first hour. The whole race I was blasting up the climbs and attacking riders on their dual suspensions as they bobbed up the mountains. The legs were light and all they wanted to do was rocket, it was working perfectly.

About half way through the race there is this amazingly fast fire road descent that is super sketchy, with monster jumps and one corner that is rutted out from rain water and four wheel drive vehicles coming up in the wet and muddy conditions. I took a huge digger on this corner and lost my position in a solid and strong group that would have carried me to finish inside the top 30.

After regrouping I was back on and hammering forward. Surprisingly my confidence wasn't shaken but sitting in no man's land I was having trouble pushing as hard as I needed to. Fortunately someone came around me and after a minute of riding his pace I got tired of it and just blasted by him on the next semi sustained climb (my playground). This continued for the remainder of the race. If the trail went up I was flying climbing many climbs in my big ring and attacking out of the saddle. I have honestly never felt so strong on my bike.

Unfortunately with my rear tire a little low from semi-burping it during my first crash I had to take it easy during the technical descents so as not to blow it off the rim. Every time I felt the rim hit I cringed. But I was able to ride smooth and not lose too much time on the best singletrack of the race.

Popped out of the bottom attacked up the next climb and just kept hammering. From the 1 hour 30 mark all the way until the finish at 1 hour 50 I rode my big ring no matter what it looked like. I felt like I was riding possessed! And then, I crashed again. Unfortunately I couldn't get up as fast this time as my right leg cramped up and I spent 2 minutes laying on the ground just trying stand up. It was brutal.

Back on the bike and a minute of spinning and I was back to being possessed. Ripping past people and making on final move to finish 44th out of 55 riders only 20 minutes down.

Maybe not my best race on paper, but based on how I was feeling and riding I know I could have been close to 15 places higher and almost 5 minutes faster without the crashes.

One thing that I was exceptionally impressed with this weekend was how awesome wide riser bars are for control and for climbing. For the past 2 years I have been a narrow flat bar rider with a 1 inch drop from saddle to bars. After some thought on my strengths and weaknesses as a rider I convinced myself that some wide riser bars were the way to go. Just this week I put on a set of Easton low rise bars that are 685 mm wide. They are awesome! Sweet leverage when climbing, lungs are held open for comfortable breathing, and so much better for cornering. I think I am a convert and will be riding the wide riser bars even on my race hard tail.

A good solid weekend of training and now to rest up for Nationals. That race is going to be brutal, but fortunately suits me with it's alpine course nature (long climb, long descent, rinse repeat).

Look for a build report of my Yeti A.R.C. in the coming days. I will be picking the frame up at the Yeti Factory in Golden early this week and then spending time to get it dialed for awesomeness at Sol Vista Ski Basin.

Bike Pure

I ran across an interesting website yesterday called Bike Pure. After looking around a little, I realized that Bike Pure is working to promote the same ideals that Transparent Racing is, and wanted to share a bit about the organization.

According to Bike Pure's website,

Bike Pure aims to protect the integrity of cycling and promote clean cyclesport. Cycling fans worldwide deserve heroes they can believe in. Supporters want a clean sport and the professional riders need their credibility back.

This is something that we at Transparent Racing STRONGLY agree with. We believe that cycling is a wonderful sport that should not be marred by illegal performance enhancers and that cyclists of all disciplines are losing credibility because of the bad choices of some racers.

One of Transparent Racing's goals is to have great results WITHOUT using performance enhancers. We believe that if a racer or rider cannot enjoy cycling without cheating, then they should not be cycling. We also seek to build trust with cycling fans around the world by being open, honest and accessible. When our team website goes live, we will be posting our training and racing data online, as well as the results from our anti-doping tests to prove to the world that we are a clean race team.

Another interesting aspect of Bike Pure is how they plan to bring about this positive change in cycling. Here is what they have to say:

Through media pressure and rider and fan support Bike Pure shall encourage the athletes and teams to sign an 'Honour Code’, declaring that they race clean, without performance enhancing drugs and with a pledge that will encourage our sport to flourish. If any rider should be deemed positive, Bike Pure encourages the introduction of a life ban from cycle sport and move forward, forgetting the doper and focusing the media attention on passion and results.

We believe it is only through the adoption of stiffer penalties that riders will think twice about doping. Riders are held responsible for their own behaviour, their sponsors can have faith that their investment is safe, and the public can have confidence in the results.

We are not naive to think this is a complete solution, but it is an important first element getting the clean riders to joining forces with the supporters and laying a foundation for the future.

So far, many well-known cyclists (mountain, cyclocross and road) have taken Bike Pure's pledge, including racers from Garmin-Slipstream, Jelly Belly Pro Cycling Team, Specialized MTB, Subaru-Gary Fisher, Spike, and Velo Bella, just to name a few.

Transparent Racing is proud to have taken the Bike Pure pledge, and will be racing and training with Bike Pure's wristband and headset spacer. Look for the blue and join us. Working together, we can return cycling to it's true form...PURE sport. (If you are interested in seeing the pledge that each Bike Pure pledger must sign, click here)

Who is Transparent Racing?

Today I want to talk about who we at Transparent Racing are. This is not a post about who each team member is, as we will be doing that later in the year, this is about our ideals, our program, and why we got started in the first place.

Sometime in February of 2009 Macky Franklin and I were talking on Skype chat while he was living in Argentina. After awhile we both were voicing our frustration at the state of sponsorship and money in the professional mountain biking industry. Particularly the fact that it is very hard to get good sponsorship as a professional racer. But our griping was not primarily that there is little money in the sport but that the sport is not accessible to the public in the way that road cycling is as well as many other high profile professional sports. We believe that this is the reason for limited funds for the mountain bike and cyclocross racing industries, though more on the mountain bike side of things at this point in time.

So the solution presented itself to us at roughly the same time, why not start our own team and try and fix what we believe are the problems. Thus, Transparent Racing was born.

Initially our goal was to not come out until either the 2010 mountain bike racing season or the 2009 cyclocross racing season. Well upon Macky's return to the United States he discovered that the team he has been part of for the past 2 season, Team DEVO, the very pipeline that Adam Craig, JHK, and many other American notables have come through would not be in operation for the 2009 season. After some discussion we decided to shotgun the program and come out by Sea Otter.

It has been a lot of hard work and time but things are slowly coming together. We have already lined up a number of great sponsors: WTB, Rooly Eyewear, Hammer Nutrition, Action Wipes, Squirt lube and Genuine Innovations. We are currently still searching for more as well.

So now that you know our history what are our ideals and how are we going to accomplish this? Our #1 ideal is to be transparent, open and honest with the public in all possible ways. We will be doing this by the main new media sources: internet (blogging, twitter, website updates, facebook, etc.) Not only this but we are preparing to have an independent drug testing service to monitor our blood levels and show the world that our accomplishments on the race track are clean.

Another large aspect of our program is to be an active member of the mountain bike racing community and not just the professional racing community. You will be able to see our training information, gps data, heart rate numbers, etc. after we have finished the technical aspects of the website. We want people to know what we are thinking before races or while we are out training. This is primarily an impetus of a response that Macky received on a blog post at Two Wheel Tales as to what the every day cyclist is looking for. We want to give that to them!

Please keep following us and supporting us as we move forward in this endeavor and try and raise the bar for professional mountainbike racing teams so that once again mountain bike racing can be where road racing is!