Video & Race Report: Southern Enduro Tour-Round 2

The word "perseverance" has been used the last couple weeks in a lot of different ways! For the Southern Enduro Tour and everyone involved, we were reminded last week that mother nature, and powers out of our damn control, can put challenges in front of us and you are faced with a choice; to-do or not-to-do. Although it's hard and it can feel like life sucks in a moment, that's kind of what mountain biking and enduro is all about and what make some experiences vividly memorable. We pushed through icy conditions early in the week, which lead to frigid temperatures below 20 degrees for the weekend's duration and eventually what we will all remember as the Northwoods Polar Enduro! Followed by 7"+ of snow in our region the week after the events - that much accumulation is very rare in Arkansas and especially south Texas. Hard-headily putting the Wildcat Marathon and Northwoods Enduro through its 3rd annual mark is something that we are proud of as a grass-roots team and an experience that participants will not soon forget. One that will most certainly be talked about around SET basecamp fires for many years to come. We are thankful to be back racing and super stoked for all of the racers, vendors, sponsors and venues for all of the good times ahead of us.



This will historically be the coldest race morning we've ever had in 7 years of the series. I think it was about 15 degrees... a few days after the race we saw negative zero degrees.




Stage 2, Ragnarok, is my personal my favorite trail at Northwoods. It has a little bit of everything- high speed, rocks, berms and jumps.


Two of the six stages of the race were 'event only lines'- Secret Stage(S3) & Mystery Stage(S4). They were some racer's favorite stages because they were fresh, raw and steep.


The temperatures being in the teens gave us some scare Sunday morning for the race. One of the modules that was turned on immediately showed a low battery reading...not good. I figured it was due to the cold weather. It set in hard that it would totally suck if we had all pushed that far to have equipment fail because of the conditions. The first and only realistic solution that I could think to do was scavenge enough hand & foot warmers to put on all the timing modules.


Jake Ingram shredding his way to 1st place in the Pro Men category!


The racing went well and everyone rallied on the course! It was undoubtedly cold as shit and started sleeting about halfway through. We provided some extra comfort and stoked the enduro atmosphere with warming fires, hot soup & coffee at the aid station and blasted AC/DC. Everyone pretty much bolted out as soon as they were done racing to beat the winter storms approaching on our region, so we don't have any podium photos to share this round. You can find the official results and stage times from the link at the bottom. We are planning on having a virtual giveaway for raffle prizes from our awesome sponsors- Revolution Mobile Bike Repair, Ride Away Bike Shop, Trail Labs LLC, Pickle Juice, Smith Optics, Rocky Mountain Bicycles, FBJ Creations, Fox MTB, All Mountain Style, ESI Grips and Kuat! We will post a date and time on social media.


Hiking into the venue on Monday to find the event tents about to collapse from the snow they were holding. We are looking forward to transitioning into more spring-like weather for the next two races coming up in Texas... nobody dare say the R--- word!





Photos from TD PRO Photography.

Results for the race.

Visit the series website for dates and more information.