About a month ago, I was having a beer at AZ bikes with Bryce and company, and we started chatting about putting together some races up here in flagstaff this summer. I have this idea for a “88 mile epic”:http://www.handlebarsandwich.com/crazy-88/ that I’m piecing together for august (save August 9th, more details to come), and Bryce told me about his 3-race series of uber-technical mountain bike races on some of the lesser used trails around here he wanted to do.

Well, this weekend (with about 1 day notice) I lined up with 24 other people at the bottom of snowbowl road for a little “self-flagellation”:http://www.thefreedictionary.com/self-flagellation on HAT (High Altitude Technical) Trick race 1. We divided up into “Fast, Faster, and Fastest” groups and got rolling around 9:30.

The course was a reported 25 miles with a lot of hard singletrack. We climbed up snowbowl to friedlan-prarie, up viet springs, across the road to a new trail (rumored to be called ‘sherlock’) down to 180, over to wing mountain and around wing mountain on motorcycle trails.

The first part was just a crusher. Viet springs is not an easy climb, and the new singletrack is deceptively tough. I think a lot of people were hurting after the first 12 miles (me included). Fortunately, you pass by the finish line on your way out to wing mountain and Bryce was handing out mid-race beers.

I rolled through the finish in 3rd place, downed the beer in short order and headed out for the wing mountain loop.

I quickly was caught by Randini and Sanchez. We motored along around the motorcycle trail, and although it had some cool sections, it solidified why motorcycles and bikes don’t often frequent the same trails. When you have a throttle it doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue to make the trail take turns straight up a hill for 200 yards in order to go around a tree and come straight back down. When you’re on a bike, it just becomes another nasty hike-a-bike with a frustration on the way down when you’re paralleling the trail you just hiked up. There were more than a few of them.

Steve and I took a bit of a wrong turn near the end as well and stayed on singletrack when we were supossed to bail to the road. It added a few hundred feet of climbing and about a mile to the course, but we still made it back in time for fourth and fifth place.

In the end the total was 3400 feet of climbing in 22.5 miles. I rolled in at 2:45, and I think I was the only SSer out there to finish it. In case you want to see where it all ended up, here’s a “google map of the race”:http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.handlebarsandwich.com%2Fgps%2FHAT_trick_1.kmz&ie=UTF8&ll=35.290609,-111.741085&spn=0.114194,0.203934&t=p&z=13 . If you want the gpx version, let me know.