Breast Cancer Awareness 'Cross report

Breast Cancer Awareness 'Cross
Hagerstown, MD
10/06/07

Chalk up another dust bowl 'cross race for 2007. It was also somewhere near 90 degrees, and the ref decided not to allow water feeds. This, in my opinion, is silly.

The course was actually pretty good considering the dry conditions. It was bumpy in some areas, but there were some good technical aspects that I really liked. One section was a long off-camber across a hill, then back. The turns at each end were soft and good skills were key. I felt this was one of my advantages- it turned out to be, but there were other obstacles... Like the slightly-uphill barriers followed almost immediately by an off-camber 180 degree turn. The sand pit was high-speed and ultimately had a bit of a challenging bend in it. Awesome!

At the start, I'd gotten a pretty decent spot in the pre-lineup. But then they did a call-up, which botched my position. Then they called "everyone else", and the outsides funneled to the front, leaving me with nowhere to go. So I ultimately started in the back- not where you want to be when you want to do well.

On the first lap I start to move up from the 25th or so I started in to around 10th. Now I feel I'm getting close to where I should be, and I've used a lot of energy to get there, so I try to settle in. In trying to recover, I stopped pedaling on the one fast descent on the course- also the bumpiest spot on the course. I get bounced around, and my chain gets bounced off the chainring. I ride out the descent, but can't get the chain back on without stopping. Once again, I'm in last place in the first lap of a race.

I continue my push back to the group, and start picking off a few guys every lap. But it's not enough. You can only make up so many spots in 45 minutes, and while I've passed plenty of guys, I can only make it back to 21st.

It was a little disappointing, but I could at least say I had a pretty good race from lap 2 on. I just started too far back to make it count.