observations

Headed out the door at oh-dark-fifteen for our sec­ond club tri­als of the sea­son, the Ice Trial. Weather looks like it won’t live up to it’s name, although it has in past years. Get to the site, get unloaded in a light driz­zle, and warm up. A lit­tle prac­tice, and some time dial­ing the carb in a bit, since it was com­pletely dis­as­sem­bled and cleaned a cou­ple of weeks ago. Focus was on the smoothest pos­si­ble off-idle response i could get, a key char­ac­ter­is­tic for a tri­als engine.

Got geared up and went over to the rider’s meet­ing. learned of an inter­est­ing plan: in order to man­age traf­fic, our tri­als mar­shalls had built an ‘out-n-back’ loop. The plan was to ride the loop to the end, doing sec­tions 1–12 (1–11 for Novices) and then ride it back to the bot­tom, hit­ting the sec­tions in reverse order (12 through 1 on the way back). Then back to the pits for water, fuel, food, what­ever, and then fin­ish with a final 1–12 ride). sounds inter­st­ing. So we divide into groups, and away we go.

We quickly dis­cover that a lot of the road and trails is a soupy, muddy mess. But the sec­tions are chal­leng­ing and fun, with very lit­tle actu­ally dan­ger­ous. It took me a num­ber of sec­tions to loosen up, and to get a bet­ter feel for the gear­ing on the bike, with the new 9-tooth coun­ter­shaft sprocket (down from the stock 10). What I dis­cov­ered is that I now have a choice of gears for a sec­tion, first for really crawl­ing, sec­ond for nor­mal or any­thing with a climb, and third for seri­ous climb­ing. All in all though, the bike ran great and seems a bet­ter fit for my rid­ing style this way. The loop was pretty long and rugged in spots and I was cer­tainly happy to get back to the pits after our first two ‘loops’. Water, a bite to eat, and gas for the bike. And out to fin­ish out with the third loop. At sec­tion 1, we run into the rest of the Advanced class, and they’re already fin­ished! What the.…. turns out they just rode two attempts on all the sec­tions on the way back down, so they only made two trips up and down the loop. smart guys!

In the end, i had some good rides, and a bunch of sloppy rides, 3’s that should have been 1’s, and 1’s that should have been cleans. Fin­ished in 4th or 5th place, I think. I hope to get some prac­tice before the next round, hope­fully that will help keep me a bit sharper.

A ques­tion for all of you: how much do you con­sider the loop trail to be part of the chal­lenge of a tri­als event, in par­tic­u­lar, a local club event? There was some grum­bling around the pits after the event about the folks who didn’t ride the loop trail all 3 (or 4) times, and I’m curi­ous if there’s a con­sen­sus on this issue. I’m not seri­ous enough about it to care that much, but my guess is that my score would have been 5–9 lower with the extra fatigue and arm pump that I had on my thrid loop. What do you folks think? Send me your com­ments, I’d love to hear from you.

keep those feet on the pegs!
black­dog

As you may have noticed, keep­ing up with this blog didn’t top my hit parade last year. it wasn’t a very good year for tri­als, either, so it didn’t mat­ter much.
I got ill dur­ing the colum­bia cup, then I injured my elbow while prac­tic­ing last june, and it took many months for it to heal, so I didn’t ride very much through the sum­mer. so that’s ’09 in a nut­shell, on to 2010!

THe year started out with our first event, the “Plas­tered Pur­ple Pen­guin” on jan­u­ary 3rd. A new loca­tion for most of us, a pri­vate area in Marysville. We had excel­lent weather for jan­u­ary (45 degrees and not rain­ing) and Tom had a unique event planned with a group check observed tri­als in the morn­ing, and a Scot Trial in the after­noon (a race where you points both for the dabs in the sec­tions and for how far you are behind the tar­get time).

This area has a 3.5 mile scram­bles track laid out, and that’s pretty much what we used for the loop, with the sec­tions in the woods next to the track at var­i­ous places. Really easy to wear your­self out try­ing to go quickly on the scram­bles track; that’s not what a tri­als bike is really good at!

A good selec­tion of sec­tions, with not a lot of splits between advanced and expert, but fun. Once again I proved con­clu­sively that I can­not ride com­peta­tively at the advanced level by just hop­ping on the bike the morn­ing of the event, and call­ing the 30 min­utes warmup ‘prac­tice’. I had fun, but made a num­ber of stu­pid mis­takes, and fin­ished in last place. I also had some issues with the bike being hard to start and kick­ing back while start­ing, so i guess it’s time to catch up with all that deferred main­te­nance. (this will be a sub­ject for a future post)

after lunch, 5 or six folks (all but one on larger enduro machines) tried their hand at the Scot Tri­als. It cer­tainly looked like fun, maybe next year I’ll talk some fool into loan­ing me a WR or some­thing and try my hand.

All in all, though, a fun way to start out the year

Next Event: Walker Val­ley, Feb 7. See you there. Direc­tions are avail­able on the Puget Sound Tri­alers web site.

keep those feet up!
black­dog

The day began with dis­ori­en­ta­tion: April in west­ern wash­ing­ton, clear skies, pre­dicted high of 70 degrees. WTF? oh well, guess we just deal with it as best as we can. For a long time north­west­erner, this was seri­ous cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance ter­ri­tory.

the day before, i’d done some prep on the bike (clean air fil­ter, check tires and flu­ids, etc.) and then taken it for a quick ride around the place. This was of course the time that i mis-judged a log cross­ing and snapped the front fender off, right at the brace. a quick ses­sion with some scrap plas­tic and a few pop-rivets set things right. I had every inten­tion of order­ing a new fender, but the fix worked so well that i might not.

any­way, on to the event. nor­mal morn­ing rou­tine, faith­ful read­ers (both of you!) will know it by heart now: drive up, find a park­ing place, unload, pre­flight the bike, warm up, then off to sign-up. signed up, and when the mar­shall asked me if i could observe, i said “sure”. saw him write my name down for sec­tion 1, but didn’t really think about it too much. of for some more warm up. found most of the morn­ing sec­tions, then went look­ing for the after­noon sec­tions. found 2 and 3, but no oth­ers. 2 and three were both steep hill­climbs, with the exits nor eas­ily reached with­out rid­ing the course (a ‘no-no’). so i walked through 3 and on up the trail. found 4, and fig­ured out that the rest of the sec­tions were laid out along a trail on the side of the moun­tain that would give a moun­tain goat sec­ond thoughts. ‘rugged enough to make a rab­bit crash’ is one phrase i’ve heard. walked back to the bike, and found sec­tion 1; hmm, that looks like a cake­walk. well, sec­tions (the ones i saw, at least) aren’t going to be the tough part of this tri­als, but the loop is going to take a toll. back to the pits to get ready to observe. morn­ing rid­ers meet­ing com­mences, they are call­ing off observers, but my name is not uttered. rrruuh? i let the com­mo­tion ebb a bit, then go talk to the mar­shalls; ah here’s the con­fu­sion: when i singed up, he wrote me down to observe in the after­noon, for­get­ting or not real­iz­ing that i was rid­ing in the Advanced class, in the after­noon. well, looks like they aren’t short of observers, so i’m off the hook. so i head out for a bit of seri­ous practice.

i resolve to focus on things i’m uncom­fort­able with: steep drops, turns over jumbly rocks. I man­age to re-teach by body a few things about stay­ing loose in the bike, and lean­ing the bike over; don’t try to keep it ver­ti­cal all the time, it really does turn bet­ter when it’s leaned over!
after about 45 min­utes, back to the pits for a snack and water. while i’m relax­ing, a friend wan­ders up and is exam­in­ing the back tire of my bike, from the look on his face, i’m guess­ing he’s about to point out a giant hole in the tire, or a torn-off knob or some­thing. but no, he points out that i’ve a bazz­il­lion feet of rusty wire wrapped around the rear sproket, hub, and brake disk! exple­tive. i quickly bor­row a stand and a BA crescent-wrench, whip the rear tire off and start in with the wire cut­ters. a few min­utes of cut­ting and pulling, and it’s all gone, and no dam­age done. we spec­u­lated that it was the wire belt­ing from a tire that some ass­hat prob­a­bly burnt in a ‘camp­fire’ in the area.

a bit more prac­tice, some on the big under­cut log (which resulted in one of slow­est ‘over-the-bars’ i’ve ever had) and i feel like i’m ready. around noon, we get the sig­nal for the rid­ers to meet up at the scor­ing trailer. get our instruc­tions (yel­low rib­bon marks the loop, it starts over yon­der and ends over that­away, ya got 3 hours, now git!), and away we go. off to sec­tion 1, looks like a cake­walk, sure enough start off with a clean. nice. on to 2. sec­tions 2 and three and laid out par­al­lel to each other, up a steep hill­side. 2 is a mixed-media climb, dirt, a big rock step, and the rocky dirt on to the exit. 3 is about twice as long, starts in the water, makes a sig­nif­i­cant right turn 1/2 way up, and has a piece of old log choker cable about an inch in diam­e­ter across the line, about 8 inches off the ground. the cable has some give, so it’s really not much of an obsta­cle, but it makes ya think. back to 2, watch a clean and 3, decide on 2nd gear, and go for it. good trac­tion, i do a lit­tle ‘trac­tion bounce’ just after the rock bit, and get out clean. down the hill and attack #3. 2nd gear, con­cen­trate on get­ting through the turn clean, and then get­ting a bit of momen­tum built up before the cable and the steep steps after it. a lit­tle foot­peg lever­age just after the cable, and i made it out clean! you can see a photo here. (notice the wire cable just under the bike’s front wheel.) yee haw, started off with 3 cleans! but now we get to the meat of the trail. it’s vis­ciously steep, both uphill and down­hill, and requires nearly as much effort to ride as a sec­tion. #4 has a sharp left fol­lowed by a steep climb, 5 has a nasty root-filled uphill left that caught nearly every­body for at least 1, etc. etc. 8 and 9 were a bit note­wor­thy in that they were a con­tin­u­ous sec­tion; 8 has a dev­il­ish lit­tle turn with a per­fectly placed dining-table sized rock right at the apex at foot­peg height, forc­ing you into exactly the wrong place for the exit. very tricky!

fin­ished the first loop in about and hour and 15 min­utes, the entire loop couldn’t have been a half mile long. but it was work. I’ve been rid­ing events over the past year and tried to keep track of what my heart-rate was doing at var­i­ous times and what my calo­rie burn was. One of the things that i’ve learned is that if i’m sit­ting at the entrance to a sec­tion, and my heart-rate is over 145, i should take a lit­tle rest break until it comes down to about 130 or 135. I ride much bet­ter, given the extra 2 min­utes it takes for the rate to come down. so on the sec­ond and third loops, i paid atten­tion to this; the loops was so short and so chal­leng­ing that unless i gave myself forced breaks, i’d just wear myself out. by doing this, i man­aged to get through the event with­out once arriv­ing at the end of a sec­tion and not being able to get my hands unclenched from the grips!

fin­ished out with 39 points, which turned out to be good enough to ace Cur­tis Mann out of 3rd by 1 point. Michael Jor­dan schooled all of us though, with 24 points, topped off with a 4-point loop 3!. Nice ride, Michael. Kyle Lar­son also put in a good ride to take second.

Next event is May 3rd, at Deer Flats, above Gold Bar. Great place to ride, nasty place to get to. about 5 miles of rough, rocky road.
If you’d like to find out what observed tri­als are all about, let me know, i’ll get you detailed direc­tions and you could come up and spectate.

keep those feet up!
black­dog

Well, it’s been a long time since my last blog entry. Too much excit­ment on both the job and the fam­ily front has left lit­tle time and energy for think­ing about tri­als. Nonethe­less, I did try my hand at the Deer Flats event in July. I hadn’t been on a tri­als bike for about 2 months, and as expected, I was really rusty. I got through the event with a few decent rides, but never really got in the groove and never really got con­fi­dence in my rid­ing. When it was over, the scores showed how rusty I was, last of the assem­bled Advanced riders.

Time marches on, I was out of the coun­try for the Sep­tem­ber Trial, recov­er­ing from the creep­ing crud for Hal­loween I, which brings us to Hal­loween II, at Gold Bar. I had decided before head­ing out that since I hadn’t rid­den in many weeks, and effec­tively only once since June, that I would ride Sr. inter­me­di­ate instead of Advanced.

Arrive at Gold Bar about 8am, find a park­ing spot and get unloaded. First impres­sion is of strange weather; it was below freez­ing when I left my house out­side of duvall, but there was a warm breeze blow­ing at Gold Bar. Over­all, a fan­tas­tic day weath­er­wise: sun­shine, a bit of wind, and about 58 degrees. it doesn’t get any bet­ter than that on Octo­ber in the Pacific NW.

Went out and warmed up, includ­ing try­ing out a few rocks that have given me trou­ble in the past. not too bad, but obvi­ously out of prac­tice. I take a look at a few Advanced/Expert sec­tions and con­firm my ear­lier deci­sion to ride Sr. Inter­me­di­ate; With no prac­tice or rid­ing time for the last 4 months, those sec­tions didn’t look like a good idea.

Back to the pits, get ready, and away we go. Sec­tion 1 at many tri­als is kind of a gimme, an easy sec­tion to get you warmed up and build up your con­fi­dence, before of course, smash­ing said con­fi­dence like a china bowl on a tile floor. Being a tri­als mar­shall requires just a touch of sadis­tic ten­dan­cies. Not today how­ever; a fun lit­tle sec­tion, but it has a dia­bol­i­cal uphill right turn in it, with a lit­tle exposed rock just where the back wheel will be when you need to lift the front wheel to float the end of the turn. Never did fig­ure that one out; took a point there every time. Had a pretty bad first loop, includ­ing a 5 when I slipped on a slick rock in sec­tion 9, try­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to the slick tree root step. It’s not just the mechan­i­cal rid­ing skills that atro­phy from no prac­tice, it’s also the men­tal parts of the game; line pick­ing and see­ing the cre­ative approaches to obstacles.

Any­way suc­ces­sive loops got bet­ter as I got back in the groove, even post­ing a loop score of 2 on the thrid loop. That’s what the good rid­ers were post­ing from the begin­ning. My even­tual score of 24 was good for 5th or 6th, not a shin­ing per­for­mance for some­one who took home a sec­ond place Advanced back in april! oh well. It was a great event, with good sec­tions and good orga­ni­za­tion; as always: Thanks to Jon and fam­ily! you guys rock!

So all this brings us to the end of the sea­son, and look­ing for­ward, past the hol­i­days, to next sea­son. The way I see it, I have three options as to how to approach next year. I could get off my ass, clean up my trail sys­tem on my prop­erty, build some prac­tice ses­sions, get out there and prac­tice, and set my sights on being com­pet­i­tive in Advanced next year. I could con­tinue with my “ride when it’s con­ve­nient” plan and ride Sr. Inter­me­di­ate next year. Or i could take a year off from com­pe­ti­tion, and attend all the events as pho­tog­ra­pher and scribe, try to gen­er­ate even more press and some excite­ment around Observed Tri­als in the Pacific Northwest.

Right now, not sure which way to go. It seems as though work and fam­ily life are going to set­tle down a bit, so the ‘get com­pet­i­tive’ approach might be pos­si­ble. I’m not going to make my deci­sion until after thanks­giv­ing, we’ll see.

See you on the trail, Keep those feet on the pegs!

black­dog

To start, I want to say thanks to all of the folks who worked their butts off to put this event on. It was orig­i­nally planned for Deer Flats, about 5 miles up the road and, more crit­i­cally, abouit 1500 feet higher in ele­va­tion. We’re hav­ing a late, kinda crazy spring here in west­ern Wash­ing­ton, and we had snow in the low­lands last week, and pretty much got snowed out of Deer Flats. But folks ral­lied around, and put on a great event.

Sun­day morn­ing dawns with typ­i­cally spring weather for around here, maybe a bit chilly. 45 degrees and driz­zling off and on. A quick bite, gather my lunch, cof­fee, etc.,
and i’m out the door. I’m dri­ving the Rover today with the box trailer behind it, because when the weather is nasy, there’s noth­ing nicer than going into the trailer at lunch break, fir­ing up the Kero­sun heater, and get­ting truly thawed out. After an unevent­ful drive to Gold Bar, I pull off the pave­ment at Reiter Pit, and head for our rid­ing area; holy pot­holes, bat­man, this road is really going to hell! Later I’ll see a com­peti­tor pull in dri­ving a BMW 5-series sedan; I won­der how he got it up the road with­out rip­ping out one of it’s key organs?

Find a spot to park, untie the bike, but it’s driz­zling, so I leave it in trailer, no sense get­ting soaked before I need to! Get my gear on, go say “Hi” to the famil­iar faces, and stretch out a bit. Go out and warm up, prac­tice a few easy things and head back to the pits. Sign up, and have a bit of a dis­cus­sion about group check vs. cross check. I grudg­ingly admit that the weather makes group check­ing a bit more attrac­tive today, but reg­u­lar read­ers know that I always ride worse dur­ing group check, so I’m not a huge fan. After some dis­cus­sion, it is decided that we will cross check. So i get my assigned duties, and head out to my sec­tion. Sec­tion 6, I find it eas­ily enough, and dis­cover, in what would become a theme for the day, that it is long, I can just barely see the start gate from the end! A lit­tle bit of walk­ing around reveals a good spot to observe from, which allows get­ting to the end gate to mark the rid­ers card in only a few steps. Ah, my first rider, here comes Ted, almost always our first novice/intermediate rider, he just flys! He puts in a good ride, and motors on. Through the morn­ing, I had a few fives (stalled motors mostly), one of which was an actual dis­mount from the machine. Front tire went this-a-way, rider went that-a-way. No injuries, so it’s all good. All in all, though every­one rode well, and most improved their scores as the morn­ing pro­gressed. It was great to see the new faces, as well, wel­come every­one, hope to see you at another event soon.

Back to the pits, grab lunch, in this case beef stew and some french bread. Hav­ing a ther­mos that will keep stew or soup warm is really nice on these soggy 42 degree spring days. Change into some dry gear, gas the bike, and get ready to go. Oh, wait, tire pres­sures. Check them again, decide I’m happy with 4lbs in the front and 3lbs in the rear. That’s a bit lower than usual, but I fig­ured trac­tion was going be a bit scarce, and it seems like the Dun­lop tire likes to run a bit lower pres­sure than the Miche­lin I used to use. We get our score cards and the rid­ers meet­ing, and one of the Mar­shalls vaguely waves a hand and says ‘loop is yel­low rib­bon, and starts over there’. Find the sec­tion, and start fig­ur­ing things out. This ones on a hill, pre­dom­i­nately down­hill, with some turns and climbs in it, and it ends with a series of tight turns
left 90, right 180, then right 90, over a set of tree roots and logs. I get a bit out of shape early, due to over-enthusiastic use of the front brake, and end up with a 3. Not bad, but I can do bet­ter. Back out on the loop and away we go. The next three are log and turn sec­tions, I like the logs, but the turns are really tight. In #3, I take a planned dab early in the sec­tion and it works out pretty well. The small logs where the bark is gone are really slick though. Very del­i­cate get­ting over them at any kind of angle. Work­ing though the rest of the loop, mostly rock-jumble type sec­tions. Things are really slick today, and for me, at least, it’s way too easy to pick up more speed than I can smoothly scrub off. I have been slowly com­ing to the real­iza­tion that my bike may be too quick for my rid­ing style, and maybe I need to do a bit more to slow down the ini­tial hit off idle. I’ve changed to a slower throt­tle grip, but I’m think­ing a gear­ing change or a small change in the igni­tion tim­ing might be just the thing. We’ll see.

Fin­ish­ing out the first loop, sec­tions 8 and 9 are rock jum­bles, and really tight turns; I strug­gle through both with 3’s. Then to sec­tion 10. This one deserves spe­cial men­tion, mostly due to the fact that it had two chal­leng­ing climbs, and two downhill/dropoff obsta­cles that looked like they would gen­er­ate fender-puckering fear. The entrance was tricky, over a rock then a log at 45-degrees, then some wind­ing around over some logs, and up an S-shaped climb up the hill, and the last 6–8 feet are com­pletely loose mud. I never got past this point, all day. 3 attempts, 3 fives. On the last one, I asked, humor­ously, the checker if I could yell a cuss-word? “I didn’t hear nothin”, sez he! When I was done vent­ing my frus­tra­tion, he asks “Is that going to be in the blog?”. Yes, Ted, it’s in the blog: F*CK! That said, I did notice from the posted scores that sev­eral folks got through it much bet­ter, and there were sev­eral cleans there on the day. A hearty ‘Nice job’ to those guys, that one was tough!

Any­way the next two loops went rea­son­ably well, get­ting close to clean­ing a cou­ple of sec­tions, improv­ing my score in a few oth­ers, and com­pletely floun­der­ing though a few. Just as I went out for the third loop, it started rain­ing. By the time I got to #2 the third time, the logs had got­ten really slick, expe­cially the big one right at the entrance, and my dreams of a clean there were washed away! I fin­ished the trial with a decent loop, except for sec­tion 10, and headed back to the pits. Adding up the scores, I had to stop and do real math at one point, as I counted 17 ‘3’s on my score card! At that point in the day 3 times 17 was more than my wee brain could han­dle! That’s a ton of threes, with the upside that some of those coiuld have degen­er­ated into ‘5’s, and the down­side that some of them should have been ‘1’s or ‘2’s, but isn’t that how it always goes? Totalled up to 76 with 2 cleans, which I felt OK about, but didn’t really think it would put me in con­tention.
A bit later, as they are hand­ing out the awards, I dis­cover that 76 and 2 was good enough for 2nd place in advanced on that Sun­day in April. wooT!

All in all, a fun day, and I’m really look­ing for­ward to the Colum­bia Cup. It will be in Gold­en­dale, WA, May 3rd and 4th. Love to see you there!

Keep those feet up!

black­dog

Another sea­son has begun. We should have got­ten started in Feb­ru­ary, but too much snow kept us from hold­ing our tra­di­tional “Ice Trial”. A tad ironic, that.

Be that as it may, roughly 35 of us showed up at Gold Bar, under cloudy skies and with mid-40s tem­per­a­tures. Got unloaded, geared up and went off for a bit of explo­ration and warm-up. I hadn’t been on the bike out­side my own yard since my last prac­tice ses­sion in mid-November, so I was a bit rusty and my tim­ing and judge­ment was off. But I got warmed up, and deter­mined that the dirt had a fair bit of trac­tion, but that the logs and rocks we’re really slick after an entire win­ter of soggy, cold weather. I did find myself hit­ting obsta­cles with either too much or too lit­tle speed and throt­tle, just rusty, I guess.

Rid­ers meet­ing comes and goes, and I’m off to check sec­tion #4 in the morn­ing. A cute lit­tle sec­tion, deceiv­ing in it’s sim­plicty. There were basi­cally 2 rocks to go over, one at the entrance and one at the exit, with some turns and gen­tle climbs and descents between the two. Decep­tive, because the final right hand turn was quite sharp, and down in a dip, with a rock on the inside of the entrance that kicked the rear tire out­wards just an you started climb­ing out. Took me a few tries to fig­ure it out, and it took many points from the Inter­me­di­ate class rid­ers through­out the morn­ing. If mem­ory serves, Jesse Howard had it com­pletely fig­ured out and had the smoothest rides there all day.

Had sev­eral spec­ta­tors stop by and ask about Observed Tri­als, and about the bikes, etc. One them were a cou­ple of gen­tle­men who intro­duced them­selves as Dale and Dean. They asked a bunch of ques­tions about bikes, and Dale indi­cated that Dean had been involved in Tri­als in the past and was think­ing about get­ting back into the sport. He was ask­ing about Sher­cos, so i told him he could take my ’04 2.9 for a spin. As soon as he rode away, it was obvi­ous that he’d rid­den fairly seri­ously at some time, I could just tell from the way he bal­anced bike and his stance. Later I found out that their last name is Dor­cas; Dean Dor­cas was the NATC High School national Cham­pion in 1984. In my book , that qual­i­fies as ‘rode seri­ously!’ Wel­come back, guys, hope to see you at more events!

The morn­ing fin­ished with­out inci­dent and I went back to the pits to get ready for the after­noon ride. Check the gas, tire pres­sures, fill the hydra­tion sys­tem, and then decide whether or not to wear the jacket; on. off. on. off. on for now, but i’m takin’ it off just before i start. A lit­tle before 1pm, they turn us loose, and it’s across the power lines to find Sec­tion 1. Not too bad, a nice re-introduction to how this is sup­posed to be done, after a win­ter of couch surf­ing and fire­place tend­ing. I get through with a 1 (should have been a clean), and head on out. The loop is fairly open, and the sec­tions are nicely spread out, which is nice, it keeps large lines from devel­op­ing at any 1 sec­tion. Section2 is a hill­climb with sev­eral changes in sur­face, another 1, and i’m feel­ing pretty good. That is about to change. Sec­tion 3 is on a rock face we call 3-step. It’s some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of 80–100 feet long, very steep, and has sev­eral steps and sur­face changes in it. The advanced line here today is a Z-shaped path up the right side of the first pitch, across the face, and up a slot in the left side of it. This is after enter­ing 1/2 way up, and drop­ping the last 20 feet, and mak­ing a U-turn in a field of softball-sized round rocks. The trick to a sec­tion like this is know­ing how much trac­tion you have at every point, and how to bal­ance the traction/power/momentum equa­tion. I never did get it right. First attempt was too slow, got messed up on the crossover, and knocked a marker down the face, sec­ond time had too much momen­tum, and the third time I missed the line and failed to make it back up the first pitch. I know the sec­tion is rid­able, but it was very intim­i­dat­ing and my speed/traction judge­ment was rusty. Oh well. The rest of the loop was about what you’d expect, a mix­ture of not-killer sec­tions, and a cou­ple of real ‘preg­nant dogs’. Sec­tions 6 and 7 bear spe­cial notice. As you may know, West­ern Wash­ing­ton, espe­cially as you near the Cas­cade Moun­tains, tends to be a bit soggy. Rocks that sit around in this cli­mate for years and years acquire a del­i­cate coat­ing of slime, the trac­tive prop­er­ties of which approx­i­mate pol­ished mar­ble with motor oil on top. Sec­tions 6 and 7 were laid out through field of these rocks, includ­ing sharp turns and a cou­ple of steps and climbs. For the Expert-class rid­ers, these were con­tin­u­ous sec­tions, iId guess total length of about 150ft actual. Advanced-class rid­ers got a 15ft ‘free zone’ between the two. Per­ceived length while attempt­ing to nav­i­gate this rock pile on a tri­als bike was about 2 miles! At any moment the back wheel was likely to step out, and a loss of momen­tum at a cru­cial moment meant a bunch of lift­ing and push­ing to get things mov­ing again. The best I did here all day was a 3 and a 2 (and that 2 felt like a clean!).
Any­way, these two sec­tions were great chal­lenges to punc­tu­ate a larger set of doable, yet still tech­ni­cally chal­leng­ing sections.

A cou­ple of triv­ial, yet inter­est­ing obser­va­tions from sec­tions 9 and 10: Sec­tion 9 was a clas­sic log sec­tion, a few tight turns, and 4–5 log cross­ings, depend­ing on class. The final log in the sec­tion has been there for so long that both sides are start­ing to erode, and in pro­file it’s now more rec­tan­gu­lar then round, about 26″ tall, and 12″ across the top. This log really brought home to me how rusty my judge­ment was. On the first loop, I hit that puppy with about 30% too much speed, sailed over, and nearly missed the right turn to the exit gate. The sec­ond time, I pussy-footed it, and wound up tak­ing 3 points, basi­cally car­ry­ing the bike over the log. It wasn’t until the last loop that I actu­ally hit it cor­rectly and got out smoothly. More prac­tice I could use.

Sec­tion 10 was also inter­est­ing, for another rea­son entirely. Upon walk­ing the sec­tion, it was fairly obvi­ous what the mar­shall intended. The trick was that the sec­tion wasn’t marked with con­tin­u­ous rib­bon, which meant that some cre­ative line pick­ing made the run up to the hill climb sub­stan­tially longer and straighter than what seemed to the the ‘intent’. Not a huge deal, but there was some dis­cus­sion with the observer about how far out­side the ‘intended’ line was legal, and ‘cheater’ lines. This has been a long-standing dis­cus­sion in the Tri­als com­mu­nity, but in my opin­ion, the tri­als mar­shall gets to make the deci­sion: either mark with spot (non-continuous) rib­bons and accept the fact that tri­als rid­ers are clever crit­ters, and will find the eaiest line, or use con­tin­u­ous rib­bon where they want to enforce a par­tic­u­lar challenge.

all in all, a great way to kick-off the 2008 sea­son. Look­ing for­ward to many more great events! Keep those feat on the pegs!

black­dog

A won­der­ful day greeted a fairly large turnout of rid­ers for our last event of the year. Not too cold and we had nice sun­shine all day. A bit of warm­ing up and pok­ing around, inter­est­ing sec­tions, looks pretty tech­ni­cal, with lots of turns with obsta­cles in them. Lit­tle did I know.

Got signed up, and con­fered with the other Advanced rid­ers; we are doing group check, so we had a quick dis­cus­sion of whether to split the 5 of us up to make things go faster or not. the dis­cus­sion was incon­clu­sive, the 5 of us pretty much rode together the entire day.

out to sec­tion 1, start look­ing around. whoa, nel­lie: imag­ine rid­ing up the right front wheel of a mini-cooper, turn­ing left, and then rid­ing down off of it at the left rear wheel. that’s kinda what the first rock obsta­cle looked like. Many folks had trou­ble there, some went over the bars com­ing down, some didn’t make it up, and some if us just had a case of the heebie-jeebies once we got up on to and were look­ing down into that drop-n-turn as you come off. never did get through there with bet­ter than a 1 all day. On to the next sec­tion, which really summed up the tri­als. It had a challenging-loooking rock step at the entrance, and then looked like a tight trail ride through some rocks and up the hill­side. The entrance was the easy part, it was the slimy rocks in the turns, no good place to put the back wheel, and the decep­tivly slick leaves that made it really tough. All 11 sec­tions were like that, in one way or another. It took us over 2 hours to ride the first loop. Over­all, I felt like I was doing OK, but being a lit­tle bit too timid. This was not helped by going sky­div­ing off the rock in sec­tion 3; made it up, but was too far right, and when I needed that dab, my right foot found only air. wheeeeeee, smack! right on the rocks with my right arm and shoul­der. But no last­ing dam­age, just a nice bruise on the elbow. By the third loop, I’d gained some con­fi­dence in the bike and knew a bit more about where the trac­tion was, and had a few good rides. There was gen­eral agree­ment, though, that this was a tough event. Many of the cor­ners seemed impos­si­ble, at least for Advanced riders.

Fin­ished, back to truck to lick the wounds a bit. Then got around to tal­ly­ing the score. Wowsa, thatsa lotta points! 105, with 2 cleans. But this time the 1-point score dif­fer­ence went in my favor! 3rd place! Hey, I made the podium!

As a final event of the year, it was a good end­ing. I think i’m get­ting some of my con­fi­dence back, I have a win­ter plan of a few things to take care of on the bike (front brakes need some atten­tion, and i’m going to see if i can get the clutch to have a lit­tle softer engage­ment point), and I’m going to be ready to go in 2008!

see y’all on the loop trail! keep those feet up!

black­dog

Whew! arrive at the park­ing area about 8:30am sun­day, got out of the truck, Holy Stiff Breeze, Bat­man! We’re at about 1900 ft. alti­tude, and up on an exposed hill­top where they’re run­ning a gravel pit, and the wind is blow­ing pretty good. Get over to sign up, Sean (one of the Mar­shalls) allows as how we’re prob­a­bly going to do a Group Check event, where rid­ers go out in groups, and check each other. It allows all classes to run at once, which makes for a much shorter day, and given the way the weather looked to be movin’ in, the right call.

That said, I’m not a big fan group check tri­als, for purely self­ish rea­sons: i his­tor­i­caly haven’t rid­den well in group check sit­u­a­tions! I have a ten­dency to get into my own head too much, and psych myself out, espe­cially after a cou­ple of bad sec­tions. When doing cross check events, I can take advan­tage of the clock, and give myself breaks, snacks, and re-group time where I need it. In a group check sit­u­a­tion, I always feel like there’s some­thing else i need to be pay­ing atten­tion to, and my rid­ing suf­fers, espe­cially on the first loop, when things are often quite slow.

Any­way, enough whing­ing! We get our cards and punches, and away we go. Down the hill, up the road, into the woods, and there’s #1. A tricky ups­lope with an angled log in it, then a sharp turn, cross-hill over to a descent over a slick slab rock, about 8 feet long. Not too tough, but I don’t have con­fi­dence in the trac­tion yet, and get out of shape after the log, and pad­dle through. Oh well, not too bad, I think, and we go on. much of the first loop is like that, includ­ing a cou­ple of really dumb 5’s, stalled the engine, hit a tree with the shift lever, that kind of stuff.

But as the day went on, I felt like I was rid­ing bet­ter and bet­ter, and it all came together pretty well on the last loop, I put together a loop of 17 points, low­est of any­one in my class, and had 2 cleans. Alas, it wasn’t enough, and I wound up with 78 points and 3 cleans, which was a solid lock of 4th place advanced. again. At least I feel like my con­fi­dence is return­ing, espe­cially on the last lap sun­day, and my con­di­tion­ing work is pay­ing off, it wasn’t until the end of the third loop, after sec­tion 10, that i really started hav­ing fore­arm pump and cramp­ing problems.

So, in short, it wasn’t the ride I’d hoped for, but I am still improv­ing. If I could make the time and moti­va­tion to prac­tice more, I’m sure it would advance my cause a bit faster.

Next event: Hal­loween Two, by Jon Payne, at Gold Bar, WA. See ya there, and keep those feet up!

black­dog

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

Due to the usual com­bi­na­tion of work, chores, other motor­cy­cles, etc. I hadn’t been on my tri­als bike until the evening before this event. To make the grim even grim­mer, I sprained my back on wednes­day, bal­let danc­ing with a weed­whacker. So the evening before, I go out into the pas­ture for 30 min­utes, work up a good sweat, and man­age to semi-remember what this whole tri­als thing is about. kinda. not too con­fi­dence inspiring.

So when sun­day morn­ing rolls around, we (my lovely wife accom­pa­nied me to this event) mosey on out to the site. A new area, about a mile far­ther than Deer Flats, on the same crummy road. 5 miles of hard, rocky, pot­holed dirt road. about 10–12 mph is all my old truck wants to do, at any faster pace, it wants to pitch it’s occu­pants through the roof. Hmmm, maybe there IS a draw­back to the $29.95 shock absorbers. Arriv­ing at the site, we scope it out, and find a place to park, mostly off the road. Not much park­ing room here, so every­one is pretty much parked on the road shoul­der, and strung out over about 1/4 mile of road. I pro­ceed to sign-up, where I sign up for AM Sports­man. That means I’ll ride the easy sec­tions, but my score won’t count for tro­phies or points. This way, I get to have some fun, get some of my chops back, and not run the risk of aggra­vat­ing my back too badly. It looks like it will be a great day, weather-wise, too: 75 or so, clear skies.

After sign­ing up, I gear up and head out into the woods to warm up, and take a look at the loop. I find a bunch of both morn­ing and after­noon sec­tions, looks inter­est­ing. I bop around a bit, and then try to find an obsta­cle that chal­lenges me a bit; i find two par­al­lel logs, 8 inches apart, and behind them a slip­pery pair of rocks. Looks good. after 3 or 4 attempts, I’ve got it pretty well, and I feel like I’m rid­ing OK. So i mean­der up the trail to find the rest of the morn­ing loop trail. I’m on the trail back­wards for a while, and then lose it a bit, but I can see some rib­bons in the dis­tance, so i head that direc­tion. There I find sec­tion 3, and there is an observer and rid­ers there! Holy cow, I’ve lost track of time, missed the rider’s meet­ing, and now the start! Ask the observer where 1 is, and head out. I find the first sec­tion, force myself to relax a bit, and walk the section.

By the end of the first loop, I’m only behind the next-to-last rider by about 5 min­utes, so no prob­lem on time. I relax and my rid­ing starts to get bet­ter. It’s a short loop, only about a mile, and there are only 8 sec­tions (nor­mally, a loop con­tains 10 sec­tions). About 1/2 way through my 3rd loop, I think to ask an observer “How many loops?” “Four” is the reply. Ah, now I have another loop to ride. No prob­lem, I ride rea­son­ably well, but not great. I fin­ish, total the score (38 and 9 cleans), hand it in, even though no one is going to write it down any­where, and hunt down the Mar­shall. My lovely bride and I have a party to attend, and if I am not needed to observe in the after­noon, we’ll skate. So I ask, mak­ing it clear that if I’m needed, I’ll observe (it’s con­sid­ered really bad form to ride and then not offer to observe, as the event is con­tin­gent on hav­ing observers). He allows as how he has enough, so I can split. We do, and make our way home.

A cou­ple of days later, I check the scores, just to get an idea of where I would have placed: looks like in inter­me­di­ate, I would have won by a sin­gle point. So that’s not bad, for no prac­tice. Now I look for­ward to the next event. Our next event is at a loca­tion out­side ellens­burg that we cal Funny Rocks. It’s a bit of a drive from here, so I’m debat­ing whether to go or not. More news as I decide.

Thanks for read­ing.
black­dog