Campmor H2H race #4, The Darkhorse Gallop

Today was stop #4 in the Campmor H2H series, The Darkhorse Gallop, put on by Dark Horse Cycles. Today’s race was held at Stewart State Forest, which features some of the best singletrack in the series and this course was especially good because it had some awesome brandy new trails! Dark Horse also gave out special prizes to those who carpooled with 3 riders or more, it is awesome to see a shop doing it’s part to make these events a little greener! Of course there was the dreaded #69 curse, and today it claimed another victim…

With Stewart being about 2 hours from us, we needed to be on the road a little early, so NigNug, Frenchie, and myself met up over at our local shop, High Gear Cyclery. We threw our Fisher 29′ers on the roof, set sail, and the shenanigans soon followed. I’d like to say at this point, most of what makes racing fun, has little to do with race itself, and more to do with the people that attend. We of course met up with our MTBNJ buddies and their mascot, Shaniqua, and I got to put some faces to some of the other screen names on the forum. I love meeting new people.

Our group got our bikes together and went up to registration to collect our carpool prizes and numbers. I watched as the lady handed me my number, the cursed #69, the card had been dealt, I shrugged it off, the curse can’t be true can it? Tymor park, I was #69 and tore my rear tire to pieces, but that was just bad tire choice right? At Lewis Morris Juan suffered a race-ending crash and ended up breaking his rear wheel. Bad luck? At Waywayanda the unfortunate #69 ripped his derailleur off his bike. I thought maybe it was like lightning, which never strikes the same spot twice, I had been dealt the number once already, surely I would break the curse right? Wrong.

A sign of things to come came while pre-riding the prologue. My legs felt strong, we pushed hard. The second time around, I pushed harder. I opened the throttle up full bore, and snapped my chain. Damn. Luckily, Frenchie was prepared and had a link on him. I was saved, the curse tried to get me, but it was too early, I dodged the bullet. Again, wrong.

My race started as usual, I went out hard and sat in 3rd wheel into the woods. Not too far in, I went out front. There was a preem for the first one through the 1.7 mile prologue, I dropped the hammer and opened up a huge gap by the time we came out onto the fire road climb. Not wanting to explode early, I sat at tempo up the climb thinking I had the preem in the bag. I paid no attention to the small group that bridged to me on the climb and I slipped into 5th just before the preem. Damn. No problem, my legs felt great and I just sat in through the next climb confident I would do well today. We came up on the 19-29 guys before we got to the top of the climb and we started moving through traffic. 1 guy didn’t give me enough room to pass and I ended up on a sketchy part of the downhill and caught my front wheel at full speed. I crashed pretty hard, but immediately got back onto my bike to work on getting my place back. My front brake lever was spun up on the bar and I lost fluid, no front brake, no problem, who needs brakes? I hit it back into place and continued on. I caught back into position and went to drop the hammer to reel in the leaders when my chain dropped. When I stopped to fix it I realized I broke my chainguide as well. I spun it out of the way and continued on. Every time I hit a bump, my chain fell off. As annoying as it was stopping , I noticed no one was catching up either, I didn’t realize how big of a gap we opened up. Coming into lap #2 I dropped back to about 8th or so. I tried taking smoother lines as to not bounce my chain off, but it was hopeless, the curse was taking it’s toll on me. By the end of lap #2 , I was done, all I was doing was passing people and having them rip by me while I put my chain back on. Victim number 4 of the 69 curse.

…Coming out of the Prologue, photo by Norm…

There is of course a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, and today that pot was called Taco Bell. There is no wrong a Fresco Bean Burrito or 3 cannot right! On the ride home I learned that both of my peeps had also been involved in crashes. NigNug was run down by someone pre-riding the course during his race and he got hit head-on, more than likely costing him the podium, as he was in the lead when it happened. In the same race, the same thing happened to my MTBNJ training buddy Fred, who recovered only to break his wheel just before the finish. Frenchie fell trying to hop a log at 80mph, he broke his helmet. Can the curse be coming for the ones I love? Let’s find out next round, the NJ State Championships!!

-Jim.

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