Sea Otter Classic 2012

So yesterday was my first Sea Otter Classic Cat 2 cross country race and my first time back at SOC in 2 years. Previously I had ran DH but my fitness had been shitty and bikes to big and heavy! :) So my buddy and I headed down Saturday around 11:30 and checked in our hotel in Monterey and unloaded the bikes and arrived at SOC around 2:30 and it was pretty dam hot out! Stopped by the WTB booth and saw Forrest and Marsh and Dev and got to hold little Finn for the first time! We walked pretty much the whole booth area and grabbed a beer and headed up the hill to the DS final. These guys haul Ass! Cool to see Ryan Condrashoff get 14th killing it in a skin suit! Afterwords we headed back to town for some grub and one last beer before calling it a night. The next day we woke up and headed out to a foggy morning but at least it wasn't sunny and hot as I was concerned about riding in the heat! My Class had 39 riders so I staged my self towards the back of the pack about 5 rows (On the right side of the picture)

So at 8:05am my group took off for a good stint on the road course before filing off onto the dirt. My thoughts of hanging back and not burning out of the start kinda backfired on me because I ended up getting into alot of traffic on the first single track descent so it was a little follow the leader but after a little bit I was able to pass people on the climbs and fire roads. My body felt in pretty good shape but I think I need to push more for sure next time but you have to start somewhere:) My goal was to finish in the second half of the group and I accomplished that by taking a 16th place out of 39 riders in my class with a time of 1:47 Not bad for a traffic filled 20.6 miles:)

So I would like to thank RideSFO and Team Spare Change for there support and looking forward to some more races this year! Sean