12 Hours of Mt. Kato

Rained Out!

Andrea and I made the trip down to Mt. Kato early Saturday morning being optimistic about the weather. Earlier in the week the forecast had hinted for rain Saturday night, but unfortunately it came in nearly a day early and was already raining when we arrive at 7:00 AM.

I wasn't raining very hard, so we decided to give it a go and see what happened. There was only 7 riders brave (or stupid) enough to race in these conditions and because of the low turnout there was no formalized start. Therefore, we set out a little after 8:00 AM to a trail that was already rutted by the first two riders. The first lap went fairly well and I managed to turn in a 30 min lap, not to bad considering the conditions. By the second lap, however, the trail had completely gone away. The downhill switchbacks on "Compressor" were treacherous, and "Luge" was un-ridable. Even the shallow uphill sections out in the open were so "sloppy" that it was impossible to get enough traction forcing you to get off and climb. All this time you could hear the sand/mud grinding in the drive train and disk breaks. When I finished my second lap I was expecting to see Andrea waiting near the chalet, but she must have decided to do another lap.

I used the time to clean off the bike and survey the damages. In general the drive train looked pretty good, but in a matter of an hour I wore through both front and rear brake pads. A little over a half hour later Andrea came in and we both new that our day was done. We cleaned up the bikes the best we could and packed up the van.

Before we left town we stopped in to the "Spoke" and I found a great deal on a pair of new MTB shoes. We also stopped at Chipotle for a Fajita Burrito and some Mello Yellow.

Not wanting to waste a good day for biking we checked the radar and it looked like the northern part of the twin cities missed most if not all of the rain. We hoped that "Hillside" was dry because we had expected to ride for nearly 12 hours and we only got about 1 to 2 hours. Driving up 169 it was obvious that it had rained quite a bit. Fortunately, shortly before Elk River the roads were dry and when we pulled into the parking lot it was bone dry.

We rode three laps with out second lap being a "hot" lap. Andrea turned in a new best time of 47:12. She rode the entire lap clean and was flying through the turns and killing it on the climbs. As time goes on she keeps getting faster and faster.

We plan on making it to three of the last four MNSCS series races, but my primary focus at this time is preparation for the 24 hours of Afton (Andrea and I will be riding it solo).

This week is the MNSCS race at Welch, I hope I have better luck that at Red Wing.