Sea Otter Classic, Monterey, California

One of the advantages of flying so much is that I get to accumulate quite a few airmiles over the year and I decided to use some of them and upgraded on my flight from London to San Francisco. What a joy that was. It makes the whole flying experience so much more bearable when you have edible food, that you can eat with proper cutlery with space to actually move your arms well enough to feed yourself and a seat that turns into a flat bed. It was luxury !!

However I still arrived at Sea Otter feeling pretty tired after the last couple of weeks of travel. Not only did my body have some sleep deprivation it also had to adjust from a hot humid 30 degrees, to a freezing windy 10 degrees ! For the first 3 days we were there it was freezing and so windy it made riding back from the race venue one night quite a challenge just to stay on my side of the road ! Thankfully the weather only got better and we were basking in hot sun by the weekend.

Sea Otter is as much a festival as a race, as the downhill course has been the same terrible track for years ! Another weekend of pedalling and jumps, just this time it felt easy as it was half the length of South Africa ! It’s actually quite a fun course to ride and it’s a good spectacle for the crowds and a great opportunity to get loads of media as there are loads of people at this event. Practice was pretty early everyday for us, so we had some good time to do some training and also managed to squeeze in a visit to Fox Suspension which was great to see where alot of the product is made, tested and developed. Sea Otter was also the first time we saw our team truck that we will be pitting out of for all the North American races we are doing this year. As with everything in America it has to be big and our truck and set up was just that. It looked great and will be a great area for us to work from this season. Thanks to JBL one of our team sponsors we also have a big sound system and TV screen to watch all the latest videos the Parkin brothers are making each weekend, very cool.

Race day finally came on Sunday for me. There is no qualifying at Sea Otter just one run down the hill. I didn’t have the perfect race run as I just seemed to be carrying so much more speed than I had in practice and came into a couple of corners way too fast and turned late losing a lot of my speed. It felt like a pretty scrappy run but I pedalled hard where I had to. I was the first rider down and clocked a time of 2.21. I really didn’t think it would hold, but somehow it managed to be good enough to just take the win ahead of Melissa Buhl, who caught and passed someone in her and run. I was really happy to take the win and with both Andrew and Justin finishing 3rd and 4th in the men’s it was another successful weekend for Trek World Racing.

Home time now for some recovery and preparation ahead of the next World Cup race in 2 weeks.

Tracy