“It’s not raining!” Were the words out of more than one person who attended the 2004 Race for Chocolate. Although the trails were somewhat slick and muddy in spots from heavy thunderstorms earlier in the week, course conditions were the best they had been for several years for the race. We were finally able to include the entire trail system for the sport and expert races this year. Perhaps one of these years riders will get to experience the speed of this course in dry conditions, but it wasn’t to be this year.

With many of the expert riders up north for the national race at Mt. Snow, the expert class was relatively small for this year but it didn’t take away from some quality racing. The fast man of the day was veteran rider Kevin “Max” Causak of Tailwinds. Ride with him once and you’ll know why he’s known as “Max”. He completed the 21 mile race in just 2:14 beating senior rider Ryan Leech by about 2 minutes. Master rider, Tim Messersmith won the masters race despite being taken out by a tree. Apparently he had to ice his cheek on the drive home from the race! He has recovered now and is as fast as ever. Yours truly won the women’s expert race with Lauri Webber finishing a close second.

One of the highlights of the sport race was a competitor sacrificing his chance to race in order to find help for another injured rider. His actions and attitude were that of a true sportsman. Our hats go off to him. We also hope that the injured rider that he helped has fully recovered by now. As for the racing, Timothy Collins was the fastest sport rider of the day with a time of 1:38 and newlywed Lori Henry (who recently married Scott Henry) put in a great time of 2:01 to win the women’s race. Junior X winner this year was Brett Carper completed the race in a time of 1 hour 41 minutes.

The beginners showed up in large numbers…especially the juniors! We had 26 beginner junior men participate in the race. It was nice to see all those young faces at the race. We hope they had fun an d continue to race for years to come. Brian Murphy had the overall fastest time of the day for the men and Alaina Dietz of Cedar Bikes had the fastest women’s time.

Lastly we want to recognize Michael Burke and his wife Dawn for all the hard work they put into making this event a success. I hope that some of you had the privilege of getting to know them a little better at the race! We thank all of you who came out to race this year. We hope you had a good race and a great time of fellowship with your friends and fellow racers.