ECCC MTB 2011: UNH @ Attitash/Cranmore

 UNH rocked it out at Attitash and Cranmore this past weekend, the first time the conference has raced at those venues.  A short race report is in the USAC Weekly Wrap.  Results are on the ECCC Calendar.

This weekend basically started off right: I got home from work and Caitlin goes:

“Mmm… Somehow I didn’t think you’d already left already.  Don’t you have any idea where the race is?”

“Up north somewhere?”

“Yeah, it’s at Mt Washington.”

“Oh.”

Mt Washington is pretty damn far up there; it’s often taken us 11 hours to get there.

In any event, fortunately it took Tim and I only almost exactly 9 hours to get there, with just a little bit of traffic.  Coming back was the same, even with an unnecessarily lengthy dinner stop.  This was also my first weekend in a long, long time traveling without any of the equipment; Sam had it from the previous weekend.  It was pretty awesome to be able to roll up to the start about two hours beforehand and crawl into the back of the Prius for an hour nap…

Upon actually learning where it was, I was pretty excited about the location though we wouldn’t really wind up spending any time in town.  In many ways North Conway is not really my kind of place.  Too many trendy skiers, lots of shopping, steak houses, etc..  But it does have those gear shops going for it, and we’ve had some great trips up there to go winter backpacking on Mt Washington.

The venues worked out fairly well.  Cranmore seemed like a pretty good XC race.  Substantially more climbing than the previous races have had.  On the other hand, some of the descents were a bit fast fire road and double track affairs with some unfortunate step downs and waterbars.  I think the speed let people get in over their heads; there was notably more blood at this race than we’ve seen in a while.

Women's A starts up the XC opening climb.
Tom Sampson (Plymouth) recovers from a flat to take the day.

Short Track at Attitash was workable but really only after we built a bunch of CX style chicane sequences to break up and slow down a long, steep fire road descent.  This highlighted that there was no way Attitash would be able to host XC after their trails were destroyed by Hurricane Irene.  In hindsight we probably should have moved STXC to Cranmore as well, but it was workable.

Women's A/B short track lines up.
Derek Harnden (UVM) finally claims a victory this season.
Scott Igo (UVM) proving you really don't need to ever stop racing in the ECCC.

Downhill went off without a hitch.  Everyone seemed pretty happy with the DH trails around Attitash.  Super D was its usual terrifying affair.  The early sections were wide open gravel descents through a couple super high speed turns, not well suited at all for XC bikes.  Everybody seemed happy by the bottom though.

Early in the Men's C Super D.
Women's Super D leaders over the first crest.

Interestingly, Jesus Martinez (Columbia) crashed fairly bad in the XC, breaking his handlebars, frame, helmet, and some other stuff.  He got a bike from somewhere for the STXC but was clearly hurting.  Combined with skipping the previous weekend, that enabled Alex McAndrew (Clarkson) and Nik Patalano (Northeastern) to jump ahead of him in the season omnium standings.  All three have a shot at it this weekend, particularly with double points on the line for Easterns, so we’ll see what happens.  Could be exciting.  Nik sounds super pumped for it.

A couple other thoughts:

  • Team licenses are a definite issue.  We have a bunch of one-man shows here and in MTB we don’t really have the numbers to turn those guys away.   They also tend to be less clued in than people on the road side.
  • We need to push riders, particularly downhillers, that they need to alert us to course problems in time to actually do something about it.  Right as we’re about to get on the lift to go up and start the race is not the best time to inform us the Super D course has lots of marking problems…
  • I think we’re really going to push back a bit against running Super D in the future.  It sounds awesome, but it’s very unpredictable and tough to have a good course.  Cross Country racers get in over their head, Downhillers opt out of it, and all in all I think more people would participate in just a second straight up Downhill.

More photos from this successful weekend are in the gallery.