Ashland Super D

Team Northstar/Giant made the journey to Ashland, OR for this past weekend's 12 mile Super D event. With snowy, Winter like conditions on Thursday, it proved that being at elevation in June, you can never be certain about the weather. However the skies did clear up and the traction seemed as though it was close to perfect.



Courtesy of Jordan Lopez:

With the days leading up to the Saturday race being warm and sunny, the Ashland Super D had all the potential in the world. With my previously mentioned crash which resulted with me walking to the finish line and resulting in me finishing in 40th place last year, my race start time was 40 minutes off the start and the first racer.

As I rolled into the starting tent all the thoughts that were going through my mind faded away and only one stayed – “Go Time” then it came…5, 4, 3, 2, 1, GO!

I sprinted out of the booth, snapping through the gears trying to get up to full speed as quick as possible for the first “fire road” section of the race course. The first part of the course is non-technical with only two 90 degree turns where a riders speed can be all but absorbed. I made it a point to slow before these corners and then drop a foot and no brake “flat track” through them. Doing this allowed me to hold a strong speed through the section and let me do less work to get back up to speed quickly.



After the fire road then came the hill climb: throughout practice I made it a point to take it very easy on the climb. On these practice runs I never pushed my legs or forced myself to hold a high gear up the hill, but instead measuring the distance and maximum time of the climb. So on my race run I shifted to 3rd gear and stood up on the first 1/2 of the climb which is the steepest part of the climb. As the hill started to plane out I went to 4th gear and forced my self to hold it onto the “False Flat” after the climb. This section is almost tougher than the climb itself in that a rider can blow all their energy on the climb and have nothing for the longer section that follows it. Throughout this section and onto the 2nd fire road I felt strong and my legs felt snappy and full of energy.

The end of the 2nd fire road leads to “4 Corners”, top of the Spring Thaw DH course and the real fun section of this race. This section is fast, flowing and burned into my memory from 2 weeks back. My goal for this section was to be smooth and to push where I could to make time up on the XC racers in the course. From there to “BTI” the course is mostly downhill with one slight up hill that was more tough than the first because my legs were feeling the high pace of the race. As I neared the end of the course I came a little to fast into the new and final section of the course and this bobble caused me to come to a complete stop and to land my weight onto my left foot. As I started to get rolling again, I realized that I was in the wrong gear (8th) for a dead stop start. As I slowly started to pedal across the flat traverse, I quickly up-shifted to 3rd gear and tried to salvage my loss of speed and time. This new traverse section of the course added around a minute to 90 seconds to a racers overall time over the previous years. This flat traverse lead to a hard 90 degree right hand turn down a narrow single track and down to the 3rd fire road and a 30 second sprint to the finish line.



My overall race time was 37:50.2 with a average speed of 19.6mph. This time which placed me into 30th place of the total 72 racers.

After all is said and done I had an amazing weekend racing, hanging out with friends and experiencing the racing community and family at its fullest.

Special Thanks to Ashland Mountain Adventures – Wild Bill & Sue; This weekend in Ashland was such an amazing weekend! From all of the Northstar-at-Tahoe/GIANT Bicycles Race Team – THANK YOU for everything, both seen and unseen you did to make the race a huge success. Please keep us posted with future events and we will be there.

- Nate Byrom finished in 14th place
- Jon Wilson finished in 25th
- Jordan Lopez finished in 30th
- Lizzy English finished in 2nd in the Pro Women's

Also, big congratulations to Jr. X winner Max Houtzager with a time of 38:10.00

Full results