from organizing to participating….
The last few weeks have been pretty hectic preparing for the USAC XC National Championships here in town. This preparation culminated with an 8 day binge of working non-stop from roughly 6 a.m. to nearly 11 p.m. every day. Fortunately, I was working with a rockstar crew from Breakaway Promotions who collectively all had the mentality of “yup, we’re working 17 hours a day and we’re getting it done.” I’ve never seen a group of people work so hard, under that much stress, for that long, and get along so well. It was pretty special.
I had spent the previous week working on final course construction with SVCO and building the “rock drop” finale to the various courses at the River Run base area of the mountain. The first races started on Thursday morning and pretty much ran all day, every day through Sunday afternoon. Being so involved behind the scenes, I really missed a lot of the happenings that were going on. Thanks to Team i4 for putting together these great video recaps from each day:
And, one final video:
Personally, my two favorite moments were watching Rebecca take the Women’s Single Speed National title, and seeing Georgia Gould defend the Women’s Pro XC National Title. Congrats to both of these hard working women who do so much for the sport of mountain biking and for getting more women into the sport!
Rebecca making the rock drop look easy on her way to a dominating SS Championship title!
It made me smile watching Georgia Gould defend her Women's Pro XC title on the trails where she started riding.
After it was all over, there were ‘high fives’ all around from those involved with the events. The turnout and participation rates were significantly higher than expected and town seemed to have a tangible buzz of excitement about all things ‘mountain bike’. To put it simply, the event was a success! Immediately, talk began about how to make the event bigger and better for 2012. I know my ‘wheels are turning’ and I’m hopeful that we can succeed in making some significant improvements that will make 2012 the “hands down” best national championship ever held!
A few days of trying to catch up on sleep, take care of ‘life’ that had been neglected for the previous couple of weeks, and now it’s on the road to Bend, OR for the High Cascade 100 this weekend. I have no idea what sort of fitness I’ll have in the bag. What I do know is that I’m looking forward to spending a full day of ripping some fine Oregonian single track with a huge grin on my face!
I’ll let you know how it goes!
Ketchumgreg's Blog 
Congratulations on all your hard work. What a tremendous event to have locally, exciting to hear talk of looking towards next year.
You accidentally posted day 3 video twice. Shout out to team I4 for some excellent and somewhat unsung documentation by a great team of local creative professionals.
Here is the link to day 4 – http://vimeo.com/26557658
Peace
Thanks Dave! It was a huge relief to see the event come off as successfully as it did. The rider numbers and spectator numbers were well above our projections and the response from the community was better than expected. I really hope we can capitalize on that and take the event to the next level for next year.