A pre-season rite of passage for most professional bike riding teams is the “Team Camp”. It’s a time to meet up with everyone from the program after a bit of down time, set up new bikes, try on new t-shirts, take a bunch of photos, chat with some sponsors and media folk, you know, usual stuff. We at the Giant MTB Team are fortunate in the fact that our company’s US headquarters are just north of Los Angeles, adjacent to the Santa Monica Mountains. So, once a year, we head down there to camp it up…

This year camp took place just before the first National MTB Series race in Fontana, CA, killing two birds with one plane ticket. Everyone arrived as planned, except our young Aussie downhiller, Amiel Cavalier, who is mired in the US Sporting Visa acquisition process and stranded in Oceania… We immediately set about our business of meeting with the Product Development guys, Kevin and Dennis, who gave us a shockingly comprehensive overview of what Giant Bicycles is up to. Turns out its some totally awesome stuff. Stay tuned, we’re gonna have even cooler bikes sometime soon, and are going to continue having a legitimate hand in their creation. After learning about what the future holds I decided to go learn about the present with a kick-ass ride on the local singletrack…

Day two was media day, which was a pleasantly casual affair. Morning was some media interaction training, always good for a laugh, and, I suppose, a bit of introspection. A handful of editors from the SoCal-centric bike industry showed up for a conversational team presentation, lunch, photos, some interviews and a bike ride. I easily convinced our BIKE magazine guy, Kip Mikler that he needed to “step into my office” for a chat about the whole Olympic Business. Turns out my “office” for the week is the best thing that’s ever happened at the Giant Offices. An indoor BMX street course. Yup, a usually empty corner of the warehouse was converted into a series of professionally built quarter pipes, spines, hjps, rollers and wallrides for the lunchtime entertainment of all. Awesome. We got to chat about Beijing “singletrack”, air quality, selection procedures and such as the manager of Giant’s MOSH brand tossed fifteen foot high fufanus (that means tail tap—ed.) on the concrete wall. Did I already say awesome? The questioning ended with the obvious, “Can you ride that stuff” from Kip. My plan had worked perfectly. Jared Rando and Kurt Sorge rolled in just as I got suited and booted for what ended up being an hour-long session on Product Development head guy Kevin Dana’s STP. Turns out riding skateparks is a lot of work. I’m still a bit sore…

Thursday at camp was photo day. Usually this means standing around in a parking lot smiling and such. Not this time, A couple quick portraits and we were back in the Warehouse Bike Park, this time to get our pictures taken. After that, and a delicious Chipotle Grill lunch, we drove up to Santa Barbara to check out Giant Media Relations guy Andrew Juskaitis’ all time favorite loop. The Jesusita trail. The catch was that our Canadian photog buddy, Stephen Wilde, was going to come along and capture whatever he deemed worthy. Turns out the whole ride was worthy, perfectly techie climbing and perfectly perfect descent from an amazing overlook. Top notch loop, AJ. Even with the incredibly vibrant poison oak and an incredibly vibrant (possibly captured on film) crash on my part… As all good rides do, we finished in complete darkness, none of that namby pamby romantic twilight business… Good thing it was dark, we all would have looked awfully strange scrubbing down with a variety of anti-oak chemicals in the parking lot for twenty minutes… Hopefully it worked, I have only a little bit of the rash four days later and everyone else seems to be in the clear… Totally worth it either way.

More photos on Friday with inside Giant guy (and bike park shredder) Jake Orness set us up for an epic drive across the armpit of the universe. LA rush hour on a Friday. 60 miles in 3 hours. With the following wind we definitely could have ridden our bikes faster. But that wouldn’t be the LA way… Amazing. We got to the Southridge Park venue with just enough daylight to squeeze in a lap on the XC course, although racing it blind would have been entertaining…

Being realistic has always been an important undertone of Adam and Carl’s Team4Fun. We were realistic about our level of tiredness and just wanted to get in some exercise that coincided with racing over the weekend. Carl was hoping to continue his cold-turkey 6th place streak for NMBS openers the last few years and I was hoping to not get smoked and suggest some type of Velonews cover shot curse… Fortunately we had Kelli Emmett prove that our week of running around didn’t break us as she sprinted for fifth place in the XC. Maybe all that “one more time” photo riding was just the ticket for race prep… I guess it was, I felt great. Rode at the front with Barry Wicks, Geoff Kabush and Ricky Federau until it was just Kabush and I. He attacked a bunch, I rode steady, although my totally awesome new prototype XTC Advanced SL hardtail (with a frame weight of under one kilogram) kind of encouraged me to do some attacking too… This tortise and hare routine resulted in him beating me by 30 seconds. Which is about the cumulative time I made up on him over the course of the race by jumping the infamous (for no good reason, as it’s about seven feet) Ditch Gap. So he really beat me by a minute I guess… Carl used his uncanny knack for riding uphill wheelies to get himself back in the race mentally (wheelies are fun) and physically (turns out they’re a good back stretch) by riding a 500 yard doozie of one up the ENTIRE paved climb, passing three confused riders in the process. 11th on the day for his efforts.

Saturday night it RAINED! Wow. Rain in LA. Surprisingly it didn’t do jack to knock down the dust at Southridge Park. No matter, we can race in the dust, it’s almost welcome after a cold, wet winter… Short track was going according to plan for the 4Funners; Carl in the top five solidly, me gradually working in that direction. I caught him just as Ross Schnell kicked an impressively sized rock directly under Carl’s rear wheel, immediately forcing the tire to surrender all of its air pressure. Thanks, Ross… I kept the legacy alive by bridging to the solo leader, Barry Wicks, with a few laps to go. We worked hard to keep Geoff Kabush just off and entered the penultimate turns with time for a little good old-fashioned elbow banging. I had the drive for the pass, but Wicks had the five inches taller advantage going. Shut down… I tried the inside block pass with two turns to go, shut down again. I guess he earned it with the solo move anyway…

An hour later we did the same EXACT thing in the Super D, which finished on the same stretch. Hilarious. And maybe a bit pathetic on my part for not closing the deal… I kind of liked the sound of the “Triple Deuce” on the weekend anyway… Carl was fourth and Kelli actually closed the deal in her SD with a decisive win.

That’s about it, we’re all happy to have the first weekend under our belt and I’m especially relieved to be feeling surprisingly decent after a winter spent doing some good solid training and some good solid paying the piper in the form of lingering colds...

Next weekend we’re racing NMBS #2 in Phoenix, on some good and proper desert singletrack. Should be entertaining…