For Michael Long, the past year has been a huge learning experience.
As the race director for the Chattanooga chapter of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association’s Team SORBA initiative, Long was tasked in 2013 with overseeing the launch of three new mountain bike races in the Chattanooga area. Team SORBA established the Pick Your Poison XC at Booker T. Washington State Park, an endurance time trial at Raccoon Mountain and the year culminated with the 5-Points 50 at the Lula Lake Land Trust on Lookout Mountain as part of the annual RiverRocks outdoor fall festival.
“We went from never putting on a race to putting on three races in one year and we consistently learned throughout the year,” says Long. “We learned so much from Booker T. Washington last year that helped us at Raccoon Mountain. And if we hadn’t taken what we learned at Raccoon Mountain and applied it, then 5-Points 50 would have never gone off as well as it did.”
Long and his associates will now use what they learned last year and take it another step further, as SORBA-Chattanooga creates a new mountain bike race series to highlight the area’s growing trail system and bring more and better racing to Chattanooga.
“The plan all along was to connect all the races into a single series,” he says. “People are more inclined to do a race series where racers compete multiple times for a single goal.