Palos Meltdown a challenging event

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There’s beauty throughout the Pulaski Woods Forest Preserve. Trees are spread as far as the eye can see, and lakes are scattered throughout it. It’s the perfect escape from the big-city lights.

Sunday, sprinkled throughout the forest preserve was nearly 500 mountain bikers for the fifth Palos Meltdown. And, as has been the norm of late, rain sprinkled on them and the bike trails.

“If we wouldn’t have had the rain, we probably would have had 600-plus riders,” executive director of Chicago Area Mountain Bikers Jerry Stoeckigt said. “This is going to be slippery.”

Rain wasn’t going to stop Stoeckigt or anyone from CAMBr from doing the things the Palos Meltdown sets out to do.

“We set out to make money and get people to join CAMBr, which helps us build trails, and we want to expose people to mountain biking,” Stoeckigt said.

Conditions were rough in the morning, with rain coming down just enough to irritate the racers in the 10 a.m. novice event (8.5 miles). Chicago native John Neal, 45, who won the race in 42 minutes, 57.3 seconds, overcame the weather.

“It was wet, so that was challenging,” said Neal, who began his biking career in last year’s Palos Meltdown. “This whole event is cool. It’s hard to believe you can mountain bike 20 minutes from the city.”

Ladislav Vasak, 37, of Chicago, who was born in the Czech Republic, was too busy trying to catch the biker in front of him to notice the rain. And when he crossed the finish line in the sport race (15 miles) in 1 hour, 10 minutes, 40.6 seconds, Vasak didn’t realize that the other 198 riders were behind him.

“I was chasing the rider in front of me, but I didn’t realize until the end there was no one to chase,” Vasak said. “I won the race, I got a free hat and I won two free oil changes. What a day.”

The weather cleared up enough for the higher-level bikers to take jabs at the complaints of the lower-level riders after their races in the early afternoon.

“They are crybabies,” 37-year-old Lockport native Dan Szymanski said. “This ain’t road biking. This is mountain biking.”

Szymanski won the comp race (21.5 miles) with a time of 1 hour, 36 minutes, 12.5 seconds.

The finale was the men’s (28 miles) and women’s (21.5 miles) expert races.

Oak Forest’s Rachael Gatto, 38, took home the crown in the women’s race for the first time in four tries. She won by more than two minutes with a time of 1 hour, 58 minutes, 12.7 seconds.

“I was expecting it to be a little more slick, but it wasn’t,” Gatto said. “The guys at CAMBr worked super hard and showed you don’t need mountains to mountain bike.”

With air coming out of his tires on the final lap, Mike Sheer, 25, of Glencoe, won by a little more than two seconds with a time of 2 hours, 22.6 seconds in the men’s race.

“I thought I had a bigger gap, but I looked back and realized I had to sprint. But I was able to leg it out,” Sheer said.

Everyone was a winner in the 12-and-under Kids Race (0.5 miles), which was the only race to feature smiling parents running alongside the riders.