Last weekend was the first real DH race of the season. We packed up on Friday and headed south to Port Angeles Washington for a combined Northwest and BC Cup race. The shuttle system was pretty interesting. They stuffed us in big U-Haul trucks and drove (more like bounced) us up the mountain. It was quite the experience. Plus I was riding and still tuning my new bike that I had only ridden once the night before and had crashed. The morning didn’t feel the greatest as I was still messing with suspension settings, but towards the end of practice I was dialing it in. The last couple of runs I started trying to push the bike, which wasn’t really ideal since we only had 4 hours to practice. We got in 6 or 7 practice runs, just enough to know the course. I wasn’t feeling that confident, but I knew that there was nothing I could do, so my goals were just to get down the mountain as smoothly and quickly I could while being cautious enough so that if the bike decided to do something strange, I would be able to compensate for it. I ended up getting the race run I was comfortable with and only made one small mistake in a corner. I was 12th out of 45 and only 7 seconds back from 1rst place. 7 seconds may seem like a lot, but I can think of a lot of places on that course that I could make up that time. Lesson learned? Go up a day early so I can get more practice runs and don’t build a bike and expect myself to be used to it after one run.