MBAA Race 2 - White Tank Whirlwind

Buckeye, AZ
Saturday January 28, 2012
by: Cody Kukulski

Had a late start getting out of Flagstaff and getting down to White Tanks, ended up showing up around 8:30 the night before with no lights for a preride. Instead I decided to setup a makeshift work area in front of my car to change the gearing down on the SS from 32:18 to a 32:17. Just a note do not drop master links in gravel at night it takes a long time to find all the parts again. The next morning I went out for a quick preride to try out the new ratio and make sure everything was working out alright for the race. At the race start Travis McMaster (Team Marin) was nice enough to convince the race organizers to let the SS guys start a minute behind the Cat 1 45+. This really made the difference not having to fight geared guys for position, but it did create a lot of traffic. The race started with a nice 2 mile sustained climb and I hopped onto the wheel of my two biggest competitors Tom Ament and Hunter Keating. Hunter and I stayed on Toms wheel for about a mile then Hunter attacked and we broke away from the rest of the field. From that point on Hunter and I crushed as hard as we could to open up as much time as possible. By laps 3 and 4 we were getting burnt out on the climbs and were expecting to get caught by Tom, but we managed to hang onto our lead. Before the last climb I clipped my pedal on a rock and stalled out, and Hunter attacked and dropped me. Fighting the rest of the lap I managed to keep him in sight the whole time but couldn't close the gap. Ended up with a great second place only 20 seconds off of first and over two minutes ahead of third place. The biggest surprise after the race was finding a second crack in my frame that happened during the race. Luckily a replacement frame just arrived and I'll be ready for Old Pueblo