Norcal Racing This Weekend: Mar 25-26, 2006

This week marks the run up to the traditional start of the MTB racing season (Sea Otter Classic) and you've got some tough choices to make: Do you venture north to finish off your aerobic base with some short track racing ? Maybe head south to finish off your strong pre-season start in the coastal local series ? Get your downhill on with the first year of a new Bay Area classic ? Or pedal up to Wine Country to endurance race for a cause ? Choose wisely young grasshoppers.

• Saturday's Bogg for Africa marries endurance XC racing with social change by donating their profits to AIDS relief in Africa. It's a eight hour marathon at Bogg State Demonstration Forest in Cobb, CA (north of Napa) for solo or team participants. There's a great swag of prizes, a cool course and even a nice T-shirt awaiting your karma boosting but calorie depleting pedal.
• Also on Saturday are the training runs for the first Corral Hollow Downhill. The CHDH, formerly the Groovy Games, will pit the Bay Area's best downhillers on Livermore, CA's Carnegie SVRA course. Training runs are 11 AM - 2 PM on Saturday and the racing starts at 9 AM Sunday morning.
• Moving south on Sunday brings us to the fourth race in the CCCX XC series. CCCX 4 takes place in Fort Ord's East Garrison in Seaside, CA (north of Monterey, CA) and covers 5 mile laps of rolling, fast XC trails. Check out my race report of CCCX 2 for some ideas about the race scene. CCCX 4 starts at 9 AM on Sunday.
• Last, but not least, the first really North NorCal event of the season is Team Bigfoot's Pre-Otter. Set six hours north of Sacto in Arcata, CA, the Pre-Otter looks to blow the cobwebs off your aerobic system with multiple laps of short track XC racing.

Four types of MTB racing in four corners of NorCal; Not bad for one weekend. If you are stuck deciding which of these races is closest to you, check out the NorCal MTB Racing Map for some clues.

Technorati Tags: endurance, mtb, MTB-DH, MTB-MA, mtb-race, mtb-racing, MTB-ST, MTB-XC, norcalmtbracing