Friday, December 7, 2007

Dawn to Dusk Phoenix, AZ Dec 1st 07

Todd and I raced a Phoenix dawn-to-dusk race as a co-ed duo team. We won the co-ed division and beat all the two-men teams (a total of 60 teams) with 8 laps. The weather was basically Southeast winter weather plus wind; cold wind and rain all day for two days. But AZ never gets rain so we were riding through shallow flash floods and washes turned into rivers.
Toward the end of the day Todd started to cross one of the "rivers" and his entire front wheel disappeared, he went over the bars and ended up having to fix a flat. His CO2 didn't work so he had to borrow one from another racer, luckily help was allowed in this race.
We worked really well together and only had one close call. I came by the pit on the way to the exchange tent and saw Todd hanging out with Dejay Birtch. I yelled "What are you doing???", somehow he made it to the exchange tent by the time I got there.
I did the first lap and we alternated every lap, the goal was to try to get dry and warm before going out again. On our 4th lap Todd was really fast, on the next lap my entire goal was to beat his time, I got it by 1 second according to the official times. The lap times were all over the place because the weather (and flash floods) kept changing. I went out the day after (in perfect weather) for an easy/slow recovery spin and did a lap as fast as some of our race laps. Results