This year the 24 Hour Nationals were in June, falling earlier then normal in the race season. I gave it my best effort to be in 24 hour race shape by starting my riding season a month early. Unfortunately my plan didn’t work and I had the worst 24 hour race I can remember, six hours into the race I felt more like I had been on the bike for 18 hours! I have no idea what went wrong but it was clearly doing me more harm then good to stay on the bike and I decided to call it quits. I never like to quit a race and it was a hard decision but its over and done with now and I have to just move forward to other racing.
I had a hole in my schedule in late June, so I decided to give enduro racing a try. I signed up for the Crested Butte stop on the Big Mountain Enduro Series. Being my first enduro I wasn’t sure what to expect. The racing turned out to be mostly in the bike park on the mountain, although it was very fun, I’m not used to riding lifts and bike parks with big jumps! The weekend consisted of two days of racing with 3 stages each day, most of the stages were very short at about 5 or 6 minutes long, with one longer stage coming in at about 13 minutes. On the practice day I had a good crash when I over shot a jump and donated some skin to the Crested Butte mountainside, in the future I will for sure be getting some knee pads!
On most of the stages I did pretty placing consistently in the top 20 of a very large pro field, unfortunately I had one bad stage where I went off course twice, which killed my time. Overall I was really happy with how I did, just missing top 20 with a 21st place. Enduro racing currently covers a very wide variety of riding styles, from bike parks to backcountry epics. This race fell into the bike park lift served style off racing, which means a lot of standing around and not enough riding! I think that this series could do very well and is doing well, and is a lot of fun but to me riding bikes means riding bikes not lifts.