Fort Lewis College Athletics

Cycling races at Mountain Madness

9/17/2025 3:14:00 PM

By: Ian Burnett, Director of Cycling

DURANGO, Colo. -- This last week, the team rolled out to the crowd favorite Crested Butte Friday afternoon! Bringing a total of 96 racers, 7x 15 passenger vans, and 2 trucks and trailers, the team made the 5-hour drive with some epic rain showers and was accompanied by a wet night of camping.

Saturday, after being woken up by a hailstorm at 6:30 in the morning, we kicked off the weekend with early morning XC racing in 37-degree temperatures and some wet and wild courses. We had B/C women, C men and B men races in the morning before some DH practice. The DH racing was delayed by some sheets of rain and lighting. DH finally got underway a little late, and some of the late starters in the C category even got slammed by hail. Then after waiting all day in the rain, our XC A men and A women got warmed up and ready to race and were unfortunately met with more sheets of freezing rain and lighting across the area at 5pm sharp. That left the resort with no other option than to delay the racing until 7:30 Sunday morning.
After a wet evening of sleep the A racers rallied for a 7:30 am start on a wild XC course and huge fields. The XC had its challenges of slippery roots and tons of climbing. Racing went off in the shade of Mt Crested Butte and winter snow only a couple hundred feet above us in the high country. With heavy rain and cold temperatures, the race organizers went back to racing Avery instead of the hope of many to race Captain Jack. All the races had a solid run of slippery roots with some great results. We wrapped up our weekend with some scorching STXC on a challenging climbing course.

"We had numerous athletes take on the challenge of racing each event offered. That's 2 downhills and 2 endurance races over 48hrs of time at the venue. Pretty tough, and so cool to see their teammates and staff rally around them to help accomplish this all-around feat. With most of our top endurance riders missing Collegiate Nationals for a UCI World Cup in Canada later in the season, it was nice to see both upperclassmen and unsung frosh step up in their respective races to show face as a future national's team rider," says coach Chad Cheeney.

"This is such an iconic weekend of beautiful landscape, amazingly fun and challenging trails at high elevation and once again accompanied by cold and wet weather- making it a weekend we will always remember. I'm so proud of the racers for giving it their all in the adverse environment, coming out and cheering for the races and overall, just being amazing teammates. This is a special team and spending weekends like this with each other just makes these memorable weekends so rad," says coach Brittany Cowan.

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