Team Giant Update | Ray’s XCTT Invitational

Although I’m often a strong proponent of a pure, simple off-season there are exceptions to every rule. This particular exception was conceived over dinner with Fi:zi;k’s Nat Ross at Cross Nationals a while back. We were talking about the upcoming ski season with great excitement and he mentioned that there was an extra set of rockered fat skis in his garage in nneed of a good home for the winter. Now, I have plenty of rad skis these days but you can never be too sure… He agreed to send them over sometime and I agreed to shred.

Later on that night the conversation turned to an event Nat was helping promote at Ray’s Indoor MTB Park in Cleveland. Nat was lamenting the difficulty of getting us skinny types to attend a Time Trial style race in January regardless of the radness of setting. I agreed to consider it while privately thinking to myself that there was no way I’d go anywhere to do any type of bike contest in January.

A week later the skis showed up and I’d recovered from Nationals enough to give the Ray’s XCTT a serious thought. Recent Northstar/Giant team addition Lizzy English was fired up to go check out the park and learn tricks into the foam pit. This angle was enough to make me realize that it’d be a fun weekend checking out a city and scene that I was normally far removed from. We are all bike riders though…

An easy flight to Middle America and we were shredding the 108,000 square foot park on a cold, foggy Friday morning. Ray took us around the “lap” and showed us through the skills sections that would test each rider’s, um, skills, between each lap. With this information sorted we set out to shred the rest of the day in the park’s variety of areas. Each zone caters to a different skill set or riding style. There is the Pump Track, Flow Room, Skate Park, Beginner Room, XC Loop, Vert Room and a bunch of random stuff connecting it all together ingeniously. A typical ten minutes could involve an XC loop which then funnels you into the Vert Room which you exit to the Red Bull bowl and end up on the pump track, sweating. Yup, it’s warm in there, warm enough at least… Before we knew it the clock had struck 7pm and we’d missed the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s business hours. Dang it, another attempt to absorb local culture thwarted in the name of playing on bikes…

 Speaking of playing on bikes, we tried to avoid it in the name of professional preparation before Saturday’s race but just couldn’t resist. I reckon I did 25 laps around the rhythm room in addition to time in the foam pit and RBB before race time rolled around at 5pm. Tyler Morland and I agreed that we could “stay warm” by ripping laps on the pump track adjacent to the start/finish area while the others did their TT loops. This just resulted in more arm pump… Fortunately, Tyler has arms for days and was able to wow the crowd by manualling the rollers every lap in true DH racer style. He set the bar high but I could tell that there wasn’t much “pedaling” going on in his run. Local shredder Dave informed me before I hit the track that the course record was 6:57, held by him. Seemed fast to me… Tyler had done a 7:40 with a crash on the last skinny log ride. I was going waaaay faster that that when I crashed on the same logride… Oh well, 6:54+15 second penalty was still enough for the victory. Lizzy led out the women’s field and had a solid time going before falling off the same log that got TM and I… Must’ve been overwhelmed by all the other rad stuff going on… She ended up third in the ladies which set us up to look really suspicious walking through the airport on Sunday afternoon, 1400 one dollar bills between the two of us and two women’s mannequin legs with 1st and 3rd in the Tri-Flow XC Invitational hand painted on them. Not to worry though, Airport Security was more concerned with my container of pulled pork…

So, this was the January 13 weekend, sorry for the delay in reportage, but it is January after all, we got home and headed straight down to Squaw Valley, buying food and gas with $1’s for three days of hucking through a classic Sierra storm cycle. Now I’m riding shotgun with Carl in a borrowed Dodge Ram pulling an overloaded trailer somewhere in Nebraska on the way to Michigan for the Rally America series opener, Sno*Drift, this weekend. Off-season?

Shout out to Ray and his crew for putting on a damn fine event in an unlikely location. Appreciation to the hundreds of people who, instead of rioting when the park was paused for us to race, rang the bejesus out of some Subaru branded cowbells while we did our best impression of people who race against the clock. I’d recommend the next time you’re bored in the winter plan a trip to this shred-mecca and learn a (complicated) trick or two from some 12-year-old BMXers or a retired chap working on his teeter-totter skills. It’s a rad place with great energy.

Workin' on the three...

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