First round of nationals is now behind and it was incredibly tight again. On a 40 second track there wasn't room for mistakes. Tuukka got third place on men 12 years old after tuff qualification run with two crashes. Lauri won men 14 years old with impressive time. Oskar still struggling with his leg injury but managed to get good second place finish. I was 5th.
Now it's time to me to travel Croatia for Buzet dh race as there is month between first and second national series race.
We did enduro experiment on last sunday at Calpis in order to improve our abilitys for DH. Also, it was good fun!
Oskar took impressive first place in juniors with his Zerode DH bike and Lauri Portti took third place with his Zerode with mud tires. I bet when they get on proper dh track their bikes will feel pretty light now!
I managed to get 16th place in elite gategory with my xc bike. It came out that 12cm of travel wasn't quite enough for this race that included only just over one minute long and pretty rough tracks. I am still happy how well i managed to push the limits of my bike, as i didn't crash once and on each track i got my time within about 1 sec on every lap, exept two last tracks of third lap where i pedalled all the leftover energy out and got about two secs better times than on last two laps.
Results: http://www.mtb-enduro.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Lopputulokset-Calpis-2014.htm
Yesterday we headed to sand hills i used to ride when i was a kid. Its easy to make any kind of tuff corners or sections on sand so i think it's good. Also i did slalom track on soft sand so that we were able to practise how to maintain speed. First we just rode down how we wanted to and then we had to do whatever lines that haven't been tried yet. That's how we got more ruts and how we got slalom even harder.
On thursday we had a bit rough day as Oskar sliced his shin with his brake disc in weird accident. It deffinetly wasn't anywere near small cut as we were able to see pretty much everything in his leg and that's why Oskar got ambulance ride to the hospital. He spent there one night and had a surgery, now everything is fine and he is resting last few days at switchbacks dh villa.
Other than that our trip has been great, we have had fun on our bikes and weather has been about 20°c everyday. Two days we rode and then we had a day off. It's good to take it easy and give your hands some time to adapt to ride long tracks, specially when we had young riders with us. Now we will be riding three days on row and then hopefully return to finland in one piece.
