Everyone is asking what happened to me in Race 3 of
@grindingstoneaz ? In summary, the race course was changed mid race… This was a spur of the moment mid race decision to spare 3/4 of racers from a bottleneck at the hardest feature of the race. I can’t blame anyone for making it, but it massively disadvantaged the top riders grinding and pushing up and over the feature while the 3/4 of racers got let around and put in front. The results of this decision makes race 3 impossible to score accurately. A ton of effort and strategy goes into winning your class in a multi day event like this. I pushed hard and won the A-30 class in both race 1 and 2 because I knew how critical it was to get a front row start for race 3 so that I could be the first group at the hardest feature. I executed this along with others and teamed up with another rider and we crashed and drug and pushed our 250 pound motorcycles up the rocks for 20+ minutes. When reaching the top of Tetris my energy was completely blown. But looking down at my class competitors still waiting in the bottleneck, I knew that I had just earned an hour-ish advantage likely sealing the weekend win! Just then a call was made to allow all the racers not yet up on the rock to bypass the feature. I rolled in behind all the racers I worked very hard for 2 days to be in front of, I raced for awhile but out of frustration of what happened and also knowing that it would be impossible to accurately score this race, I pulled off course. I’m not placing blame on anyone for the decision, but I want it to be known that the scoring for race 3 is completely inaccurate for virtually all 50 of the amateur A riders that qualified for this race. Unfortunate things happen. This type of racing is extreme and conditions are unpredictable.
@jlflynn4 is the man! and put on an incredible event. The whole
@ushardenduro @ama_racing crew do an incredible job and I love the Hard Enduro community. All in all it has been a great week of battling with all of this talent. Much respect to all the racers out there.
