Northern Ohio Mountain Bike Series held their third race at Big Creek Park in Chardon on Sunday July 9. What an awesome park! Our team had never visited this relatively new State Park trail project but we will definitely be back! Most of the usual suspects were present- Rae & Duncan in sport, Quinn in junior novice and Mike, Dave & Annabel holding down our volunteer obligations.
Duncan continues to place a solid third in his category, not bad for an old farmer, if we don’t say so ourselves! Rae struggled through half of her race, opting to quit after one lap due to ongoing pain from that recently amputated thumb. Better luck to her at race 4, Manatoc, next month ( https://www.bikereg.com/events/?pid=17454 ). She would like to assert at this time that when Duncan said, “that hand’s not ready to race on,” HE WAS RIGHT. DUNK WAS RIGHT BLAH BLAH BLAH
Despite the DNF, Mat awarded Rae a flower along with all the other ladies who competed. NOMBS is all about the ladies (and the juniors) as is Team Mandalore. Women are awesome and we salute the entire NOMBS crew for their support helping us get up to the start line, watch our kids race, be safe on the course and appreciated in our community.
NOMBS schedules our junior novice category a full 2 hours before the start of adult racing. This is awesome because we can be there to watch our juniors and it also provides a huge confidence builder to newer youth racers to have the course to themselves. Big Creek is a pretty grueling spread for a youngster, even though it’s just 4.5 miles. Juniors were given a 45 minute cut off for the completion of their first lap, in order to take second go. Quinn came in with 6 minutes to spare on the cutoff and did both laps, which was only achieved by 1/3 of the starting racers. She continues to surprise us with her grit and great attitude. Also, her ability to miss podiums… Rae had to take off just before podium for a warm up and we think we probably should not have told Q it was totally okay to get back on her bike and ride around the park while she waited for us to finish. Oops.
But we DID get a boatload of photos of both the junior novices and the “little belgiums.” The littles are fantastic, even if they’re a bit hard to tell apart, or worse, find if they take a wrong turn. Maybe next year we won’t give them all the “number one” plate, as cute as that is!
The complete photo dump is here & it’s public, so share away: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rsosz5kXiLLL6wKuSZw2uzUVkomEW0NX?usp=drive_link
We are looking for photos of our teammate Mike (of Mclain Farm fame) acting yet again as the human pylon at the U Turn start. Please, someone, we NEED to see the terror in his eyes documented for all time!