Tour De Cross Race #1

Well, I missed most of the 09-10 cyclocross season...... All my intents and preparations (which were not really that much) were swept away last fall as I headed to work overseas for a long work trip. My hope was/is that the trip would be good for my career. That remains to be seen, but I know I benefitted from it.....

Back to cyclocross, I really wanted to get in a few races this season. The truth is that I'm a pretty bad cyclocross racer. While I was a 'cross a holic way before it was something popular in the US, I'm still an overweight, undertrained rider.

While I felt like my mounts/dismounts were finally starting to come around at the Mid-South championships, I still took nearly DFL.....

Fast forward to today, and I finally got to get out and race some 'cross. A good guy named Brian is putting on a full 4 race series this spring and the first race was a lot of fun. Five riders made up the entire field, but the course was certainly challenging, if a little unusual.

The course itself was 1/2 mile long and involved countless 180's, and eleven barriers --- ELEVEN Barriers!!!!!!

I got a killer start and beat everyone pretty strongly out of the gate, but that was extremely short lived.... I continued on and dismounted for every barrier. Soon thereafter, someone knocked the cross-tie barriers 90 degrees over, which made them just low enough to hop instead of dismount. OK, it made four of the eleven hoppable.

With hopping the barriers, I began to pull away again a little from my buddy Matt who was about to lap me on his first ever bike race - Someone please remind me to get my less in-shape friends involved in cycling instead of the thin muscled friends with 40 bpm resting heart rates.

In the end, I put on 16 or so laps and had a lot of fun. I took 4th place and lapped the 5th place rider 3 times.