Hey everybody! Well it was a great weekend for racing again!
The 2008 US Open at Diablo freeride park started out getting there thursday for registration and setting up the tents. We had some weird weather!! It was sunny and hot 1 minute and then the next it was storming.. made it hard to get things done.
Even with all that rain on Thursday the track was superb on Fridays practice. The track had some new section in it like they do every year with some few changes done the track was still a great track to ride as always. It was a little slippery in the woods where it was damp and rocky. The practice went very well I did 10 runs which was a bit to much really…? On top of that we had practice and Qualification for Slalom which in the beginning looked like it may have been fun but when you started to ride the track it was still very soft underneath and was like riding on pillows… plus the track was only 18 seconds long? I ended up qualifying 13th I think?…. not good at all as I stuffed up both my runs.
Saturday went well the track had dried up a little and with Slalom finals and DH qualifications we had a lot of work to do. I ended up Qualifying 7th in DH which was pretty good as the competition was stacked with World Cup racers this year. The day ended with a weird Slalom race which was supposed to be from 5-8 PM and it ended up they raced all the AM men first and made us wait up there till the end and of course we ended up starting at 8PM… so a lot of us weren’t very happy with the decision but it actually ended up being a ton of fun as a lot of us were keen on the night time slalom race with almost no light… it was different and exciting! I ended up cleaning my first run easily and then next run was against Cody Warren. First round I won by a fraction but the next round he won by a fraction so it was a very close race but Cody took it in the end.
Sunday finals were a blast! The track had changed over the weekend from wet and tacky to a dry and dusty and with all the AM men racing they tore up the track pretty good afterwards and all the rock gardens had become a little more dangerous and rougher but with a tweak of the Cane Creek suspension I was running it soon took care of that problem!
As it came time for my race run you could feel the tension in the air and as I had top 10 finishes every year I really didn’t want to break that streak so it made it even more stressful but as I have come to realize in the past all those feelings is adrenaline and you can channel all that energy into power and focus so it was good that I felt that way and it gave me a bit more confidence in the end. My run was pretty good I still know I could have taken time off of it as I messed up some little sections but nothing major but it will always be that way on that track as its hard to have perfect run on that track… I ended up with 8th position with a time of 2:42.2 just missing Fairclaugh’s time of 2:41.6…. still that is close enough for me and I also made top 10 which was the goal of the weekend!
Anyways I will leave you now with that note as the party was great afterwards with some of my good friends came down from TN with the moonshine and everybody got a good taste of it at the party.. what a way to end a good weekend.
Anyways I will see all of you later!! I’m off to get some work done here.
Cheers
