After spend­ing most of the sum­mer rid­ing my street bikes and Dual-Sport machine, I got back to the Tri­als thing on Sat­ur­day, Sept. 9th. We had fan­tas­tic weather, around 75 degrees and clear skies, which prob­a­bly con­tributed to the good turnout. I think there were 25–35 rid­ers, includ­ing at least a cou­ple of folks who came out to help or cheer for fam­ily mem­bers! We had sev­eral rid­ers from Canada, as well as a few folks from the Port­land, OR area.

Logis­ti­cally, the day went smoothly, noth­ing unusual on the drive up, just the stan­dard crappy road to deer flats. Signed up, and went out for a bit of warm-up. Found the loop and glanced at a few sec­tions. It is fairly obvi­ous that turn­ing is going to be a key skill today! Even the Novice/Intermediate sec­tions were tight! A bit or warm up, feel­ing decent, still a lit­tle trep­i­da­tion about large rocks, espe­cially going down, but bet­ter. Head back, get my gear for the morn­ing, and head out to my sec­tion for observation.

I was on Sec­tion 7, a pretty straight-forward turn-log-turn-log… sec­tion until the end, where there’s a right uphill turn with tree roots, fol­lowed by a left down­hill, also with roots. An obsta­cle that really rewards aware­ness of both wheel tracks, and the abil­ity to man­age weight and load­ing. With a quick, well-timed unload of the rear wheel, not too dif­fi­cult, but it’s a del­i­cate trick. I see a low score of 1, but a ton of 3’s and a num­ber of 5’s. The 5’s are from either stalling, or los­ing the front in the next to last turn and hav­ing it go out of bounds. Pretty soon, we’re done, and it’s lunch-break time. A quick snack, and get ready to ride.

We get our score cards and head out. Sec­tion 1 is a pump-fake: up/down/up/down, no logs, no rocks, just tight turns. I get through with a 1, and i’m feel­ing pretty good. At sec­tion 2, real­ity hits. Really, really tight turns, and two nasty rock steps, the first of which has an off-angle approach, and the sec­ond is a pointed rock: there’s *a* good line, and it’s 1 inch wide. Gulp. I get through it with a decent 3; i.e. not really floun­der­ing, using my dabs well, and hav­ing decent trac­tion. OK, not too bad. That set the tone for the day: lot’s of decent threes, a few floun­ders, and at least 3 really dumb 5’s. The first came in Sec­tion 10, which was a long hill­climb with a cou­ple of gen­tle turns in it. Not too bad, unless you miss your line, and make the turn across the hill too early.

By the end of the third loop, I’d finally fig­ured out the hill-climb, but I was com­pletely worn out. Both fore­arms and hands were cramp­ing up, and my leg was begin­ning to really hurt where i’d used it it keep the left foot­peg from get­ting scratched on the big rock in sec­tion 7. Back to the pits, tally up the score, hmmm 90 and 0 cleans. 90 i’m OK with, but I was dis­ap­pointed that i didn’t man­age a sin­gle clean ride all day. My dis­ap­point­ment was to get deeper…

Back to the truck, get changed and loaded up, then back to scor­ing to check the results. Ouch! beaten out of 3rd place by 1 point! Arrrgh! So many places dur­ing the day, I could’ve shaved a point off. Hell, I could’ve shaved 6 or 8 off just in sec­tion 10. Over­all, it was a close com­pe­ti­tion in the Advanced class, all 4 of us seper­ated by just 12 points.

So in the end, it was a very chal­leng­ing tri­als, very tech­ni­cal, but fun and left every­one with the sense that they’d accom­plished some­thing by the end of the day. I’m get­ting back to form slowly, and my con­fi­dence is return­ing. We shall see how the next 2 events go.

Thanks for reading!

Keep your feet on the pegs!

black­dog