Downieville Classic 2008 XC

The Downieville Classic! Never done it, so it was time to check this one off – driving there at 4am on race day and never having preridden the climb, the new Sunrise trail, the infamous Babyheads or Pauley Creek probably wasn’t the best of race strategies, but anyway. In fact, I’ve only ridden Third Divide once – my Downieville experience is pretty limited, and usually I like to do Second Divide.

Let’s start with the climb from Sierra City, aka the Trail of Tears. Brutal, exposed, hot and we were breathing a mixture of wildfire smoke, trail dust and oxygen. Most problematic was the fact that mostly there was only one narrow ‘good line’ to follow, with the rest of the trail very loose, gravely or rocky; in combination with the huge traffic this made passing quite energy consuming.

But it wasn’t too bad! At least when it was over and done with. Rolling fireroads and then the new Sunrise trail: a fun piece of singletrack, sandy and curvy: nice job, Sierra Butte stewards. In my naivety I had totally underestimated the to me unknown ‘Babyheads’ which were to follow. This fine piece of trail consists of a totally rutted fireroad, with thousands of rocks in all sizes and shapes littered all over it. And it goes on and on, has a few steep sections where you hang on for dear life, and to top things of it throws a few sketchy creek crossings at you.

After all the climbing and this edge-of-the-seat downhill mayhem my right leg was totally cramping up, had to stop a few times to iron the cramps out. Lotsa people passing me on the descent, I was in awe at how some of them bomb down this stuff, got some learning to do here.

Next: Pauly Creek and lower Butcher Ranch. Fun and technical singletrack, but with a dense cloud of dust hovering above it. Tailgating a rider up front results in hardly seeing what’s going on with all the dust that’s kicked up – not a good thing here – backing up a bit and someone else is bumping your tail. Did I say there was a lot of traffic; at times it was even worse than the Sea Otter Classic. Go with the flow is the thing to do here – people did crash here everywhere, and there were mechanicals galore, somehow I managed to avoid sharing their fate.

Then the short but painful climb to Third Divide – and there were the cramps again, grannying it out luckily got rid of them. This was also the first time the terrain became familiar to me – then finally the short but scarily high speed blast down Third; a woman in front of me endoed on a tech section, picked herself up and raced off as if it were nothing (no, I couldn’t keep up).

Then some more fireroad and First Divide, my favorite section of this course. I’ve now learnt the pure downhill stuff isn’t really my forte, to put it mildly, but First requires a lot of pedaling and has great flow and for the first time in quite a while I felt really good; I even managed a risky pass or two.

It then felt amazingly good to see the pavement leading into town. I think I did it in just under three hours, the GPS got f&*%ed up due to battery bounce and I had to mess with it some, and I left it running after the finish for a while.

Final words: this race was put together very well, and the (one) free beer, free lunch and town festivities were great. I even ran into a fellow E100 buddy from last year…

Update: results have just been posted here.