Double Header on mother’s day weekend

This weekend was probably one of the most physically challenging weekends I have had in a long time.

I have been playing with the idea of giving mountain bike racing a shot as it is great training for motorcycle racing and you get to pedal some sick trails. 

Saturday: I found a mountain bike race relatively close to home that would not interfere with my off road schedule and decided to give this a shot. The race was the Treasure Valley Rally in Rutland, MA. I really didn’t know what to expect, and figured that I train hard enough to be able to be competitive and hopefully have a good showing. I signed up for the Junior Expert class, which meant I got to race 20 miles (this turned out to be about 3 hours). To make a long story short, I totally under estimated this effort. These guys are gnarly and this race kicked my butt. I did end up winning my class – awesome – but I have to admit that this was much harder than any Hare Scramble or GNCC race I have ever competed in, and I can’t wait to do it again! 

Sunday – Mother’s Day (Thanks mom for supporting me even on mother’s day!!!!!!!): 

After fixing a nice breakfast for mom first thing in the morning, we loaded up the truck and headed to Eastford, CT for the NETRA Hare Scramble. Since my 250 is still in pieces, I swapped the big fuel tank over to the 125 and entered the A200 class for today. I haven’t ridden the 125 in a 2 + hour Hare Scramble before, so this would be a new learning experience. The course was typical NETRA New England stuff….rocks, rocks and more rocks. I got off to a decent start, but ended up picking a bad line at one of the 1^st bigger hills and got stuck. This put me towards the end of my class, but I wasn’t too worried.

This was a long race and surprisingly enough I actually felt quite fresh, even though I beat myself up good the day before….if anything I was pretty loose! I did suffer from arm pump quite a bit during the first hour, but eventually I was able to shake that and decided to start to push. I caught up to the leaders, made the pass, and really just wanted to ride it home and not make any major mistakes. I came into the pits about half way through to get some fuel and water. The pit stop went smoothly, dad and my sister had everything under control and I was able to get out of the pits while still in the lead. I decided to sprint one more time to build a bigger cushion to second place. This proved to be huge!

On the last lap I took a pretty good digger, tweaking my front end, and then, to top it off my chain fell off…it stretched so much it was way to lose and simply derailed…it took me a good 3 minutes and a little help from a spectator to get going again, but I was still in the lead and was able to finally get my first A class win. I am really pumped about this weekend! It was nice to see my hard work pay off, and…this is really just the beginning for me. I have a long road ahead and I’m just going to keep my head down and work hard and have a blast doing it! Now I need a day of rest, start rebuilding the bike again for next weekend, and hopefully get some time in on my mountain bike – I need to get in better shape for that stuff J

A huge Thank You to my sponsors! 

Fly Racing, Kenda Tires and Magical GoGo for helping me with my motorcycle and mountain bike racing, Manchester Honda for the help with the bikes, EKS Brand goggles for the goggle support, Eric Gorr at Forward Motion for hooking me up with the “badest” CR 125 motor, Panic Rev ministries, mom and dad, my sis and my grandparents here and in Austria!

Thanks for reading

Hunter "747" Neuwirth