The 49½ Year-Old (MTB Race) Virgin

By: Jeff “Sketchy Guy” Rezeli 

“So, if I sign up for a race, will you do it with me?” Apparently, that is how these things start.  

Rob, an old friend of mine had posed the question. Now Rob is older than me, in his 50’s, and  relatively new to mountain biking. His son had become a cycling nut on the college team during  his 4 years away at school, so Rob got interested and bought himself a hardtail 29er and started  riding the local trails.  

I, on the other hand, have been mountain biking for 30 years, from the very early days when  mountain biking became a thing back in the early 90’s when I was still in college. While I was  race curious, I had never entered a mountain bike race. So how to answer this seemingly  innocent question. “Sure. If you sign up, I’ll sign up,” I found myself saying, thinking that Rob  wouldn’t actually sign up. But sure enough he did. So I did. And a new adventure was  underway.  

The race was the first of a five-event winter circuit called the Coastal Carolina Off-Road Series,  or CCORS. It would be held at Brown’s Creek, in the middle of nowhere Elizabethtown, NC,  someplace I had never heard of much less had the occasion to visit. We signed up for a first  timers race of one 7.7-mile lap, while more experienced racers would be doing 2 or 3 laps. Rob  is retired so he did some mid-week recon of the trails and reported back, while I would go in  sight unseen. From his report, Brown’s Creek sounded legit, with some punchy climbs and  technical features to keep things interesting.  

Race day was a glorious, sunny December day - the kind that keeps me rooted in NC. We  parked in a big open field with what looked like about 200 other racers. After a little warmup and  race briefing, racers started queuing up and were launched in 1-minute intervals. Near the back  of the pack were the first timers. Rob and I were mixed in with a small group of other race  virgins of all ages.  

My biggest deterrent to racing had been my lack of knowledge of race etiquette. How can you  possibly pull off passing (and being passed), on such tight singletrack trails as are the norm  throughout North Carolina. Now I found myself at the starting line still not knowing the answer to  that most basic of questions. I tried chatting up the guys around me, distributing fist bumps all  around to size up the competition while preemptively trying to get on their good sides should I  cause a problem later on the trails.  

I had spent some sleepless time the night before considering how to approach “the hole shot”,  that mad sprint at the start of the race to shakedown the field while you are out in the open  before charging headlong into the tree line and onto the singletrack. How hard should you go  without blowing yourself up in the first few hundred yards of the race? If I get behind someone  slow, will I be able to get by? If I’m the slow one, will I hold others up? Such are the mysteries of  the universe the night before a race.  

But now the race was on, and I was charging off the line, giving it some gas, but holding  something back to make sure I had someone to follow on a trail I had never seen before. We  shot into the tree line with me in 3rd place with another rider on my heels. I held him off for  about a mile, but eventually had to let him go by. It turns out the passing, while not easy, tends 

to be rather gentlemanly and less harrowing than I expected, with the rider behind announcing  themself, and the rider ahead looking for a safe place to make a little room to allow a pass.  

And so I settled in, with my heart rate pretty much maxed out for the next 45 minutes or so. I  found myself overtaking some of the slower riders from the groups that started ahead of us,  while being passed by a few older riders and some much younger high school aged speedsters  in the groups behind, interspersed with stretches of having the trail to myself. After one lap  going flat out, I crossed the line not certain of how I had placed, and Rob and I decided to hang  around for the podiums.  

Well, there are a lot of divisions in bike racing, with different categorizations, racing different  numbers of laps, with lots of age groupings, women, high schoolers, middle schoolers. The  whole podium thing took quite a while, but I had a beverage in hand, enjoyed the spectacle, and  cheered for the winners. When it was time for the first timers, I saw 3rd place go to the guy I had  to let pass me by early in the race and knew it was not meant to be. It would be a 4th place  finish, one step off the podium. Nothing to write home about, yet here I am writing about it.  

Close but not close enough. So where to go from there? First, a post-race burger at the local  joint, Melvin’s. Then Rob and I signed up for the next race.