As you may have noticed, keeping up with this blog didn’t top my hit parade last year. it wasn’t a very good year for trials, either, so it didn’t matter much. 🙂
I got ill during the columbia cup, then I injured my elbow while practicing last june, and it took many months for it to heal, so I didn’t ride very much through the summer. so that’s ’09 in a nutshell, on to 2010!
THe year started out with our first event, the “Plastered Purple Penguin” on january 3rd. A new location for most of us, a private area in Marysville. We had excellent weather for january (45 degrees and not raining) and Tom had a unique event planned with a group check observed trials in the morning, and a Scot Trial in the afternoon (a race where you points both for the dabs in the sections and for how far you are behind the target time).
This area has a 3.5 mile scrambles track laid out, and that’s pretty much what we used for the loop, with the sections in the woods next to the track at various places. Really easy to wear yourself out trying to go quickly on the scrambles track; that’s not what a trials bike is really good at!
A good selection of sections, with not a lot of splits between advanced and expert, but fun. Once again I proved conclusively that I cannot ride competatively at the advanced level by just hopping on the bike the morning of the event, and calling the 30 minutes warmup ‘practice’. I had fun, but made a number of stupid mistakes, and finished in last place. I also had some issues with the bike being hard to start and kicking back while starting, so i guess it’s time to catch up with all that deferred maintenance. 🙂 (this will be a subject for a future post)
after lunch, 5 or six folks (all but one on larger enduro machines) tried their hand at the Scot Trials. It certainly looked like fun, maybe next year I’ll talk some fool into loaning me a WR or something and try my hand. 🙂
All in all, though, a fun way to start out the year
Next Event: Walker Valley, Feb 7. See you there. Directions are available on the Puget Sound Trialers web site.
keep those feet up!
blackdog
