Why Fight It?

 I was desperately wanting to go ride a little bit Sunday, but the wind was really obnoxious  and daylight was fading. So I had this great idea to go out and ride all of the gravel roads in our city park, McHose Park. I had never thought of doing this before. This would be the perfect quick ride, easy cruising, sheltered from the wind, and a chance to look at some of the old cross country trails that we built way back in the days! We had about4½ miles of pretty nice trail built out there at one point, until some college kid from Ames broke his collar bone and the city forbid the rest of us from riding them! The first races were promoted by my friend Steve Steward and were raced under the moniker of "Mud Sweat And Gears" My roles are dual, build trail and design shirts (remember the days of collecting shirts from EVERY RACE you entered?) This handful of 3 or 4 races, coupled with the city not wanting to get sued, lead to the trail development at 7 Oaks, which was actually better by far. We tried to convince Jim Hallihan (the head honch at Iowa Games) that mountain bike racing was a real thing, and that we had a good system in place to host a "first ever" event, but he would hear none of it and laughed it off, saying it was "a fringe sport, nobody else does it." He ate some crow for that attitude, as the year following 7 Oaks did indeed host the inaugural Iowa Games Mountain Bike Race. It was subsequently moved to Petersons Pits for better proximity to Ames and the rest of their Iowa Games festivities (and because 7 Oaks was a tough trail and was seen as un-rideable to most casual cyclists) Fun times back then.