Written by Reed Smidt – Race Director
The Carver Lake Cold Catfish Cup – Race # 3 was held on Sunday, February 19 at Carver Lake Park in Woodbury, MN. The temperature peaked at 45 degrees making almost all the single-track trail off limits for racing and riding in general. Fortunately, Carver Lake Park offers other winter riding options when the weather does not cooperate. The course was made up of a couple snow covered trails including a short section of single-track and an old hiking trail. After the short single-track loop racers were directed onto a snow packed frozen Carver Lake where the fat bikes had the advantage. After a speed loop around the lake course, racers were forced to ride across a large beach and onto a paved path. Only the fat bikes could successfully ride the beach sections and gained another advantage over the skinny mountain bikes. The paved path proved to be challenging for all racers as they were forced to ride up a 15 percent grade that was covered in melting ice and snow. At the top of the climb, the course continued on paved path back to the start/finish line. 4 laps of this roughly 1.5 mile race course went very fast, but racers continued to come across the finish line, one after the other, looking completely exhausted. The Snow packed lake, strong winds, soft beach sand and icy conditions proved to be challenging on what was a very short back-up race course.
Race times were fast and Brandon Bellew won the race with a final time of 24 minutes, 31 seconds. The top five placers were separated by less than 2 minutes. The first Annual Carver Lake Cold Catfish Cup Overall Series Champion is Heath Weisbrod. Heath Placed in the top three in every race and won the series race #1 on January 29. Congratulations to Heath Weisbrod on winning the Cold Catfish Cup Series Championship! Special thank you to Angry Catfish Bicycle + Coffee Shop for sponsoring the race, supplying demos, helping with the course and making the series a lot of fun to be a part of. Also, thank you to all the racers for participating, the volunteers that helped with the course set-up and timing and all the spectators that came out to cheer on the racers and make the event more exciting. The Carver Lake Cold Catfish Cup had a very successful and fun first year and we will definitely be back bigger and better next year.
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Sven’s photo’s are the bomb!