US Open

This past weekend was the 2009 US Open of Mountain Biking at Diablo Freeride Park in New Jersey. Diablo is one of the coolest places to ride a bike at, they have the fastest lift I've ever been on and more trails that I could handle. Its so fast that you are still breathing hard from the last run when you get back to the top! You can easily do 20-30 runs a day no problem. Luckily its also in a good part of Jersey; nice countryside and they even had 30 racks of PBR for 16 bucks!

This year the race was bigger than ever too. They added a really cool new race format that replaced last year's dual slalom. It was a 2 run format race on a slalom-type trail, but it was more of a mini DH flow trail that was perfectly smooth with tons of massive berms and a few jumps. Brendan Fairclough took the win in front of a huge raging drunk crowd. Morewood's Geritt Beytagh held it down for 4th place in front of many heavy hitters. I hope to see more races like this, they ran qualifers to get the pros down to the top 20 before doing the 2 race runs. It made for some quick, exciting racing!

I screwed up pretty badly in my DH qualifying run by just simply not riding hard enough. I missed the cut by less than 1/2 a second in 63rd spot. I was just trying to save my energy as much as possible and wasn't concerned with trying to lay down a blazing fast qualifying time. Next year I'll definitely not do that again! But it was actually nice to be able to rip up the mountain after that without worrying about killing my energy for the race.

The Diablo trail crew has been working really hard putting in some awesome new progressive features on the mountain. I think my favorite was a short trail that split off of upper Dominion that was a massive drop step down into what I could only describe as a boner jump. It was this massive pipe sticking out of the ground at about a 45* angle with planks on it that you just launched off of at full speed. So much fun! I can't wait to get back up there as soon as possible and see what else they have in store for us.

Next up is Wisp in two weeks, then Snowshoe and the first Beech race.