A couple of us have been talking about having a mountain bike race series at the end of the summer and billing it as both a "get your ass in shape for END-AR" and "come see what MTB racing is like
without going anywhere" sort of thing. If you're interested in racing, great, now read on.
It's summer, so a lot of people from the club aren't around. What we need for this type of thing to happen is
people who are willing to get involved right now. If not, well, DC is about to go incognito into double-eye, Mario and Tiff are about to leave us all for more job-rich climes ("Is this heaven?" "No, it's Iowa"), Sandman and Doublefist are having one of their deals where they go away for the summer, website extraordinaire Ted is staring into a laser in the Sierra Nevadas, does Chad even own a mountain bike?, Yost and I are scheduled to be gone for non-overlapping periods of time, and everyone else . . . well, if I haven't talked to you it's because I haven't talked to you, and I apologize. For the record, I'm out of the moon boot and able to ride (although I won't be breaking any hour records anytime soon).
I quoteth from the DC:
The bottom line is this... we KNOW that people in grand forks are very bicycle oriented. We see this EVERY DAY when we see new people on the roads, the turn outs at the TT's/Tris/Newman/adventure races and to be perfectly honest, it makes me really mad*. In the end though, we need to bring people some convenience.
I think our plan should be this...
(I haven't looked at any dates)
Contact the people at TR and see how they would feel about us doing some trail maintenance.
Host a 6 week MTB race at TR. Depending on the dates, we could start this mid July (2 weeks in July, and 4 weeks in august) Market it as a GREAT way to get into some shape for the adventure race. Offer a $10/week or $45 for the series? and 1/2 price for trail maint?
Then
Tell Yost and Ted to stop being idiots and check the message board**.
Host a CX series (6 weeks) (2 weeks in sept, 4 in oct) Mountain bikes welcome. Talk to Greendahl and run a 50/50 between greenway CX course and TR CX course.
Sanders, we would run this the EXACT same way "normal" MTB races are run. (Beginner, Sport, Advanced) Anyone can officiate. If we get alot of demand, we can run the CX races as USAC, because it would GREATLY help the ND/MN riders for upgrading.
We need to do things this year more than ever to help GROW cycling here.
Inspiring, innit?
Since we're in the planning stages, we need to talk to Turtle River State Park about actually
doing this. Ranger Steve, are you listening
***? What does UND Cycling need to do for Turtle River in order to make this happen? Regarding trail maintenance: we need to do some if we're going to host races, hence the discount for showing up to do heavy lifting (which is STILL great training for END-AR!). Do we talk to Friends of Turtle River about this? We also need people to officiate (i.e., write down numbers as people cross the line) on a rotating basis, someone to organize trail stuff, people to figure out a course (if we get TR approval), etc., etc.
Those of us who are around will do as much as we can, but hosting something like this (which will be awesome) will take more time than the few people who are interested can spare
and is a great way for YOU to get involved more in the club (did I mention hosting races is really fun and something you can put on your resume?).
If you have any ideas ("hey, you guys should have a kids category"), offers ("I have ten acres of land and you guys can build trails for free"), or really want to help out so you can race (maybe there's a volunteer deal we can run), please post a reply. It would be great to get this thing going!
*This is fairly normal. Many things make the DC mad.
**Granted, he didn't know Ted was out of state. Toaster's board karma explains the rest.
***I've never actually met Ranger Steve.