I donned the new MOB kit this past Saturday for the Nebraska Psycowpath Series opening mountain bike race at Maskenthine Lake in Stanton, NE entitled the Maskenthine XC Classic. "Where is that?" you ask. It's about an hour due west of Onawa and pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
This was the 2nd year of the race and the number of participants went up from 56 to 114 year over year. I know the Elkhorn Valley Cycling Club which did a fine job of hosting the event was pleased with the turnout for Saturday's race.
I lined up in the Sport Open field of 23 racers to grind out the three 5.2 mile laps in the steady 35 - 40mph wind. The wind was so strong that you had to pedal on the downhills when going against it which made for a race with little chance for even a few seconds of recovery. Trail was tacky and had some spots of mud bogs, but overall was in great shape. It's a new trail and still getting "worked in" which makes for a challenging ride with all the steady climbing involved and the Nebraska open prairie bumps on the trail. Perfect course for a full suspension race bike, but mine was home in the garage awaiting a rebuild of the rear shock.
After the first lap of congestion, I worked my way up and hung on to a small group of riders for most of the race content with the pace as we fought the bumps and strong winds together:
How about that, my helmet from last year actually sorta matches the new MOB kit:
I ground it out and didn't make any big efforts to open it up outside of what my conditioning could take at the moment in the opening race of the season. I crossed the line in 9th Place out of the 23 - which was a bike length or two behind 7th and 8th places.
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