Tales from the Dirt Zone SoCal Mountain Bike Racing Series

Tales from the Dirt Zone: Round Two

What a weekend at Vail Lake Resort in Temecula, CA! It was round two of the 2019 SoCal Interscholastic Mountain Bike Racing Series at Vail Lake presented by Around the Cycle.

The racing season is now careening towards its mid point with only three events remaining in the series. Last weekend 990 interscholastic student athletes and their families braved the super-bloom traffic and made the trek out to one of the League’s long time favorite venues, Vail Lake, for race number two.

It’s been known since early on that Vail Lake is host to a sort of micro-climate where-in it always seems to be windy, hot, or both and last weekend was no exception.

Temperatures climbed to over ninety early on but after months of riding in the cold everyone seemed pretty ecstatic about spending the holiday weekend glazed in sunblock.

Turnout in fact was the largest we have ever seen at the venue and in many places such as Air Force Hill there was at times almost no more room for spectating.

The venue just felt full to the brim. It was teeming with sounds of excitement and laughter that pierced through the drone of whirring trainers and buzzing generators. The pits were bustling with action all weekend and at a point our GRiT Ambassadors even hosted an Irish Jig.

While the infield felt like a festival the atmosphere on course was a bit more serious. Unlike the Lake Perris course, Vail has an abundance of winding single-track. Spans of rolling hills over terrain of an increased technical magnitude.

Pre-ride clued many racers in and as a result we saw them testing their skills. Finding new strategies to move through their fields. This resulted in podium shake ups across many of those fields. In quite a few cases tie-ups or shifts of the Leader Jersey.

It’s always exciting to see where the cards fall come race number two. Riders begin to learn the strengths and weaknesses of both their opponents and themselves. Things are only going to get more interesting as we head towards race number three.

In just a few weeks the League returns to Vail to take on an even more challenging course.