The Granogue water tower and mansion near sunset.
It's quite a crib. Photos taken from the Woodlawn Wildlife refuge
located on the other side of the Brandywine Creek.

The Escape from Granogue mountain bike race was this past weekend. Since I moved to Wilmington a few years ago, I look forward to the yearly Granogue mountain bike race. The race course lies approximately 5 miles from my house, and better yet I have a mostly non-paved, no car traffic route that will get me there... you could say that Granogue is my home course, but the fact is that the Granogue Estate is private property (owned by the mighty Dupont family) and is only open for riding on race day, so I only get to ride there once or twice a year.

Saturday morning was race day, it was rather relaxing. I watched a passing rain shower while sipping my coffee. I contemplated whether to ride Big Bird or my rigid one speed, I thought about tire selection, and even considered racing the 30+ age group rather than the leg-breaker expert 19-29yo, semi-pro, elite, pro, pro single-speed category. I do some of my best thinking over my morning cup(s) of coffee. I decided to take Big Bird out to the race, toss a skinnier, mud friendly tire on the rear, and buck up and race the expert 19-29yo, semi-pro, elite, pro, pro single-speed category. I felt good about these decisions... coffee makes me feel good in general.

I packed my large Chrome messenger pack with all of the race essentials, gels (gu), water bottles, granola bars (I hate power bars), pump, tubes, lube, tools, Camelbak and a sixer of High Life (on ice of course). My messenger pack is big, all of this stuff only filled it to a bit over half capacity. I bought the pack because I could fit two cases of canned beer in it or one case of bottles easily. I hopped on the Big Bird bike and did the slow roll over to Granogue, it was a nice ride, I saw a wiener dog in the Brandywine. I like wiener dogs... I think the wiener dog sighting was good luck.

Granogue was packed with racers, it looked to be the best turnout ever for this race. I was fired up, the racers were stoked, Marc V. (Fat Marc), the race promoter, was very happy how everything was coming together. Props to Marc and his volunteers for putting on a top-notch event.

The Chrome backbone, buy this bag if you want to carry lots of stuff.
It holds two cases of beer in cans!

The expert 19-29yo, semi-pro, elite, pro, pro single-speed category started staging around 11:30, I quickly noticed a lot of red jerseys in the group. It seems that all of the Trek VW East Coast squad showed and brought along 6 time 24 hour world champion Chris Eatough from the Trek National Squad. This is gonna be a fast one... Take the Trek "Red Army," the Visit PA team, the fast east coast Cannondale team (including Dirt Rag centerfold, Vegan Rob, AKA "The Hedgehog", and N. Jersey's "Rasta" Tim), toss in a few local pros, a few local joes (me), and you've got yourself a mountain bike race. This was a big field, luckily I had my own teammates, the Mighty Joe Reynolds and Big Bush in this race with me. Joe and Big Bush are both fast cats, little ?¢‚ǨÀúol Wissahickon Cyclery was well represented.

I have a theory about staging for bike races. It goes like this; if you can't get a front row start, start behind the group of riders who are the best dressed and look the most organized. I started behind the Red Army. These guys even had matching socks and gloves, so they gotta be fast right? The race took off fast and furious, I sat mid-pack after the short paved climb, but moved into the top ten by the top of the water tower climb. The water tower is the highest point on the Granogue Estate, it's not a huge climb, but it did the trick of stringing out the race quickly. I even rode next to Mr. Eatough for a brief moment, he took off even more quickly than I caught him, my theory is that he was still trying to figure out how to work the new 2007 XTR prototype shifters on his bike... they sure looked fancy.

Once the race had sorted itself out I found my self battling with 2 Trek dudes and the Hedgehog. It was a friendly battle, all three of these dude were stronger than I. They all would drop me on the wide open climbs, but I was able to make back time of the technical stuff and the downhills... I like going downhill. One of the Trek dudes tried to pimp me at high speed on the last lap going when going into a piece single-track, I shut him down, but it was still was not cool, NBC is the saying... Other than that incident the racing was safe, cool and friendly.

As usual Fuzzy was handing up beer to the racers in need. Fuzz usually has a rest stop set-up next to the creek on the Granogue course. I might have been able to take an additional place if I hadn't swung by Fuzzy's stop on the second lap, but not stopping at Fuzzy's was out of the question... even f I was winning I would have pulled over for a few moments.

When it was all said and done, I rolled across the finish in 7th place. Not my best result, but given the competition I was satisfied with my placing. The Red Army took 4 of the top 5 places, the Hedgehog finished 10-15 seconds in front of me, and Ray Adams from team Visit Pennsyltucky took second which stopped Trek from sweeping the podium. Nice job Ray, it's always nice to see a little guy get a piece of the action.

Next week is the Neshaminy XC just north of Philly. It should be a good one, maybe the race officials will properly put me in the race results at Neshaminy. In the Granogue results I'm listed as Ryan Leech (Wissahickon) in 7th, while the real Ryan Leech is listed as Ryan Leech (Visit PA) in 8th. Next week I have a feeling the local "Joes" are gonna show the Pros what's up.