TMMR 2 Recap
This is one of the best East Coast events, if not the best, that I have been to since Munnsville. Thanks so much to Jamie Reis for putting it on and taking care of all of us. Special thanks to all the sponsors and to Phat Dean for letting us rape his truck. Here is Jamie’s recap of the event. Photo credits go to Blair Caldwell and Crystal Graves.
For months everything had seemed to be going smoothly; sponsors were emailing left and right, and a handful of riders were calling each day for details. By the time race day came I had a list of over 100 riders that had planned to come out for either the novice race or TMMR. As the days passed and the list of people grew, so did my stoke and anxiety. I had been lucky enough to find this gem of a hill about a year and a half ago, and its amazing to have found such a killer course amongst really cool neighbors with barely any through traffic! The anxiety came with the fact that I couldn’t pull off a backup hill that would come anything even close to the race hill. WIth a week until race weekend, the weather forecast looked pretty promising, and I began to plan for the epic camp! At first I had told the woman that it looked like we would be having around 35 people. That number fluctuated over the next five days up to over 55 people, and settled back down around 45. I wasn’t quite sure what we were getting into with this place, as the woman working there told me that 35 people, 12 cars, and 12 tents would be a squeeze. This situation, thankfully, diverted my attention away from being busted at the hill and any potentially bad weather forecast. After all, camping was definitely not the biggest of my concerns for the weekend.
Friday night a few guys showed up and we rode for a few hours, hitting some local hills, campus, and some of the fun parking garages in the area. We didn’t get to sleep until after 4:30am, but surprisingly (for a bunch of skateboarders,) we made it to Tussey Mountain by 10:00am for the freeride/novice race.
I was shocked to see that when we made it to the parking area, there had already been about 20 people there! From this point on, I had the feeling that this was going to be one wild and epic weekend. We spent the day freeriding Tussey Mountain, drinking beers with friends, and just having a great time.
Around 3:00pm we moved to another spot in a neighborhood where we set up to have a little novice race. I was stoked to see that we had 17 people interested in racing when we got to the top of the hill. We ran them down in heats of three, giving Raychel a by in the first round, and finished with one four man heat. The two riders that were out in front got tangled up and ended the run in a bit of carnage. Unfortunately, with the thrown together system of racing for this race, and laid back nature of it, I didn’t get down a list of the final four, or the winners (I apologize, and will try to figure it out ASAP.)
Congratulations to those guys who competed, it was awesome to see all of the stoke during and after the race, and I know that it got a few more people into actually wanting to downhill skateboard. Stoke!
We took a few more runs, shot over to Walmart for some supplies, and headed to Seven Mountains Campground for a night of partying and hanging out with friends. When I showed up there were already tents scattered everywhere and a few fires started. Not more than an hour later there were tons of tents everywhere, the partying was under way, and everyone was having a great time. We raged pretty hard, maybe too hard because apparently “22 hundred to zero-8 hundred hours is lights out!,” according to our war-vet neighbor.
Surprisingly nothing too bad happened that night. I got to bed around 3:00am, and I know that there were a decent amount of people still up at 8:30am, when I got up to head out.
Justin Metcalf won the camper of the year award.
After sketchily making it to the race hill in pretty bad condition, I was pleased to see that the debris on the course was already taken care of, the neighbors at the top of the hill were out and having a good time, and there were no issues to take care of. We got through practice and registration smoothly, and began heats of standup.
The first round was pretty brutal! There was carnage left and right, I had to delay sending just about every heat because we were having bodies scraped from the pavement. People were mud-covered, bloody, and having a great time. After the first round we were left with 16 riders, and competition was tightening a bit. There was a ton of great riding, and I knew that the top 8 was going to be epic:
*Jeremy Ross
*Steven P.
*Anthony Flis
*Chris Buono
*Sean Graves
*Brandon
*Alex Newton
*Mike Rubin
I could only really see the push and the riders make it through turn 1, but I heard that these heats were awesome.
Our final four were (in this order:)
1. Sean Graves
2. Anthony Flis
3. Michael Rubin
4. Alex Newton
Congratulations guys, you killed it!
We had the same winner from our luge (15 riders) and classic luge (13 riders)
1. Tony Mistretta.
Congratulations Tony!
After the prize ceremony, a bunch of people got to freeride the hill, and Jeremy Ross landed a 360 slide shovit. He is a beast.
I’d like to thank all of our sponsors who were so gracious to support this event. I couldn’t express my appreciation enough to these people:
My boy Ray from Rayzor Tattoos and skate shop.
Tommy from Sundae Skates.
Graham and Andrew from Rayne.
Sarah & the guys at Daddies Boardshop.
Rus & the Soda Factory Crew.
Wayne and Surf-Rodz.
Mark and East Coast Core Skates.
Adam Dabonka and Skate Rags.
Alex from Wank-Longboards.
Anton from Tutone Skateboards.
And last but definitely not least, my good friend Dean Keller from Phat DeanZ, who was awesome enough to pick up buns for me for the hotdogs, let us destroy his truck, donate tons of prizes, and best yet–for giving us the opportunity to hang out with a rockstar like himself.
Thanks to everyone who was able to come out, I had a great time, and you better believe that there will be a TMMR3. Bigger and better. Hope to see you guys there, and also at the rest of the races on the circuit this season.
Big thanks to Anthony and the Beast Coast crew for getting this up, and for putting together such an awesome site.
For more pictures and video of the event and all the crashes (there were some great ones) check out the thread in the videos forum here: http://www.beastcoastlongboarding.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=366
