The Plog: December 2009

Sunday December 13th I decided to balls up and do my first Cyclocross race. I had been thinking about doing one all season and finally decided I would.

The night before the race it rained a few inches making the race a sloppy, sloppy, sloppy mess. Luckily, I talked my teammate Travis Finan & riding buddy Dana Goodman into racing the Beginner's class with me as well. As soon as we got lined up the gentlemen next to me decided to tell us he usually races a few classes up, but had somewhere to be today so he figured he'd race in our class. That's great and all but seriously? It's beginner's for a reason. . . Needless to say, he still didn't win. Our USAC Judge on hand told us that our race length would be determined by the race leader after the first lap, based on his lap time. Apparently his first lap time was good enough that the judge thought we could do 3 laps in around 20 minutes. 2 laps would've been great, 3 laps was killer. The first lap went by pretty quickly. The other 2 guys in our race separated themselves quite quickly from Travis & I, but we held tight. Lap 2, the course was already showing signs of wear with only 7 racers to hit it so far, at this point I was glad we were the first to race. My biggest fault in this race was not practicing clipping in with my borrowed bike's pedals. They were just a bit different than my SPD pedals and with my messed up shoe I had hard time clipping back in after a remount. I feel like I probably lost a lot of time trying to mess with my shoes in the middle of the race, oh well! So back to the race, the third lap Travis started to hit the wall and the gap between he and I grew pretty wide. At one point almost halfway through the third lap I caught a quick glimpse of 2nd place, but he was way too far ahead to be caught.

Ended up I finished 3rd in my first cross race. I must say it was a lot of fun and I can see why everyone enjoys Cyclocross as much as they do! I'm sure next year I will be doing the Collegiate Circuit of Cross.