USN mountain bikers navigate Chickasaw singletrack in 1st race of season

By Steve Smail, Amy Dortch, and MTB Team Coaches

After a week of brutal 100+ temperatures and heat-limited practices, the USN mountain bike team formally began its 11th season with the first race of the 2023 NICA/TICL series at Chickasaw Trace Park trails in Columbia. A total of 26 sixth through 12th-grade cyclists lined up, our largest representation ever at a race, welcomed by cooler mid-80s temperatures, but still with stifling humidity following overnight storms that made the trails very slick for the first races of the day.

The 4.2-mile lap at Chickasaw begins with a super fast grass and gravel start, followed by 1.5 miles of tricky and technical singletrack, followed by another 2 miles of fast and flowy singletrack, culminating in a quad-busting half-mile climb with an especially tough technical rocky section. Depending on the category, racers did 1, 2, or 3 laps of the course.

 

The girls wave opened the day, with veteran ride and Senior Maya Guha beginning her final season riding in the JV girls category. A strong group of 8th graders followed a few minutes behind, including Asha Guha, Hannah Mackler, Adeline Miller, Maggie Weiss and Suzie Zhao. 7th graders Elsa Absi, Brianna Castro, and Harper Hughey in addition to 6th grader Mac Perry all followed soon after. These girls quickly discovered a single track trail attempting to dry out but with a slippery slime still at the surface, making for treacherous conditions in which no rock or root could be trusted for traction. Guha finished 2 laps in just over an hour, with Mackler, Weiss and Miller also completing 2 lap races. Despite the conditions and temporarily losing her shoe on Lap 2, Mackler posted our fastest MS times of the day, finishing 2 laps in just over 49 minutes with a blazing 23 minute first lap. Weiss and Miller finished in just over an hour, with Absi and Castro riding their 1 lap races in just over 30 minutes. Perry had great first-ever race and along with Asha Guha and Hughey, all posting single laps at the 38 minute mark. Zhao, just recovering from a leg injury rode a solid lap despite not having much chance for training. Our MS boys raced next, with 8th graders Aidan Harris, Garrett Northwall and new teammate Seth Hauser all putting in laps ranging from 27 to 35 minutes. 7th grader Charlie McNulty had technical issues with a wheel and got slowed down during his single lap, and new 6th grade riders Peter Weiss and Owen Spangler rode together posting nearly identical lap times of just under 31 minutes. Overall, Mackler, Absi, Maggie Weiss and Owen Spangler collected our team points, giving MS a respectable finish of 12th out of 25 teams from across Tennessee. Mackler, Absi and Perry all broke into the top 10 of their categories. There’s a lot of athletic talent and speed in this middle school crew, and we look forward to watching how these cyclists develop over the 5-race series.

 

By high noon, our veteran high school mountain bikers got dry trails but the humidity was out in full force and conditions progressively took its toll on speed and endurance as the lap counts ticked up. JV Boys category seniors Christopher Haynes, Benjamin Kampine, along with juniors Quinn Dehner, Leo Frein and Tate Green battled 70+ cyclists in a large and competitive field. Haynes posted our fastest team lap of the day at 19:55, finishing 3 laps in 1 hr, 2 minutes with Frein and Kampine several minutes behind but all suffered cramps maintaining 12 miles of race pace for over an hour. Green suffered a slide out corner crash that slowed him down on Lap 2, while Dehner’s fast first lap caught up with him for a tough 2nd lap in “survival mode”. 3 freshman boys were gifted the hottest part of the day for the final racing categories, with Charlie Blau, new teammate Caden Carrabba and and Avery Savona clocking in solid first laps, with Blau and Savona tracking each other for their 2nd lap. Maya Guha, Haynes, Frein and Kampine collected our team points, finishing 17th of 26 increasingly competitive school-based and composite-roster high school teams.

 

For the day, having 26 cyclists start, navigate and finish the first race is exactly where we want to be, and establish for all riders a baseline for the remainder of the long season of 5 races through late October. Our next race is Sunday, September 10th at Pugh Bourne Park near Jackson, TN. The next best chance to cheer on the team at a local race is Sunday, September 24th at Lock 4 trails in Gallatin. 

Special thanks to our co-coaches Dave Crumpton, Gregg Shepard, Stephen Carr, Matt Lukach and Edgar Castro.

All race details for the season: https://tennesseemtb.org/events/races/