MTB Race #3: Fun, Flat and FAST in Memphis

Race #3 Report: Shelby Farms, Memphis, October 21st, 2018

Finally! A beautiful cool fall day with sunshine and dry trail conditions greeted the MTB team for Race #3. Morning temperatures were in the 40s for race start, but the flat and fast course allowed for some high energy output and everyone warmed up quickly.

We had 9 racers competing, and only 2 from our Middle School squad were able to make the start line: Eleanor Shepherd racing in the 8th grade girls category and Tate Green racing in the 6th grade boys. Eleanor started well and put in 2 very consistent laps over the 8 mile race, with only 6 seconds difference between her lap times, finishing 6th in her category at 56:36. Tate went out hard and cruised through a very fast first lap, and then paid for it on his second lap, fading a bit and finishing 18th out of 26 with a total race time of just over an hour.

We had a large contingent of HS boys competing, with Sophomores Gavin Gordon and Alexander Haynes in the 3-lap, 12 mile Sophomore category. Alexander had a great race with consistent 21 minute laps finishing 16th in the top half of the field. Gavin put in solid 24 minute laps and finished 27th.

That leaves us with 5 USN high school boys in the 4-lap, 16-mile-long Junior Varsity category with 44 riders total. Yoshi D’Souza raced for the fist time this year, riding well and just a few minutes behind Cameron Stenhouse, both completing 3 laps over 1 hour and 11-ish minutes on the course. Cameron posted a 32nd place and Yoshi nearby in 33rd. Raleigh Parr put in 3 super-consistent laps (with only 6 seconds difference!), finishing 25th in 1 hour and 7 minutes. Probably the most exciting finish for a USN rider was for Campbell Luschen, who finished 12th and outsprinted a rival that Campbell could not drop and had been tailing him only inches apart for almost 3 laps. In the last 200 meters, Campbell pulled away on the uphill finish and got a gap of a few seconds, finishing the full 4 laps over 1 hour and 16 minutes.

But the performance the team had been predicting on the flat and fast trail was from road-bike specialist, Senior Arvin Jansen, who can be incredibly fast on any bike and is building on a successful road race season and several months of training and racing with the HS XC team. In this race, Arvin luckily avoided mechanicals that have plagued him in years past, and took advantage of the long wide-open field sections to fly to the front of the JV field with about 6 other riders during the 1st lap, including a road bike teammate who rides for the Williamson County Composite Team. These two riders proceeded to drop all the other JV boys by the 3rd lap and they didn’t look back. Arvin came within 10 seconds of catching the race leader on the last lap, but could not bridge the small remaining gap after riding at his limit for over an hour of effort. (Physiology tech note: Arvin's AVERAGE heart rate was 183 beats per minute over the 70 minutes of racing). Arvin finished in 2nd place, only 25 seconds off the top podium spot, and the 1-2 pair finished more than a 90 seconds ahead of 3rd place. It was a near-perfect race execution and Arvin’s first trip back to the mountain bike podium since the race in Memphis his Freshman year.

The team has less than 3 weeks to prepare for its final race, the State Championships in Sewanee on Sunday, November 11th. This course is notorious for its rocky and rooty trail, along with some long climbs on top of Monteagle mountain. We’ve had snow on the ground there in years past, making the race a true end-of-season challenge.