Unless you are into mud (and many of you are) this has been a spectacular fall in Washington and Oregon. Sunny skies and warm temps have extended the comfortable riding season quite a bit and I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it after the epic spring we had.
I’ve been trying to use my helmet camera for cross racing, but it kept fritzing on me during the races, so I took it over to Lacamas Lake Park last night in order to dial it in and enjoy one more day of late October singletrack on a bed of crunchy fallen leaves…
Howdy all (again). Here’s a report from the Saturday Cross Crusade #4 in Astora, OR.
As a quick summary: I ended having a tough race with a hand full of mechanicals and some trouble with the added hills, but of course I still had a blast. Below are a few pictures my wife took. If you want to read the full report, click through the break for the nitty gritty.
The cross season has already been chugging along just fine for a few weekends now, but I’ve been on the bench because I’d lost my motivation… or something like that. This week I found it again looking at pictures of Alpenrose and decided to jump in for my first CX race of the year. I’d read that last week had 1400 racers, but when I arrived in Wilsonville yesterday my jaw just dropped at the sheer numbers of racers and spectators running about. Amazing! As I lined up for the Bs 20 minutes early, I know I was in trouble because there were about 200 people lined up in front of me. That number was reduced by 100 as the 120-ish single speeders sped off leaving about 109 of us B racers starting a minute after. It was by far the biggest race start I’ve ever done, and to think… we were all funneling onto teensy little singletracks. Good times!
On the gun it was pretty funny site to behold. I didn’t even move for about 30 seconds while the huge pack slowly untangled itself, but eventually I was underway amidst a whole lot of people with silly grins on their faces. Mine included. It was good to be back on the cross rig! The course was pretty gnarly but very fun. I counted about 732 turns and eleven trillion washboard sections. Technical skills paid in dividends as I picked off rider after rider and slowly made my way up. I wasn’t really in better shape than many of the other guys, but so many people were eating it and picking bad lines that it wasn’t that hard to make good headway if you were careful and focused. I counted about 30 riders that I passed before my bad luck struck. I got overconfident with my lines and didn’t bother to pull my front wheel up on a big bump. bAM! psssssssssshhhhhhh! Flat tire. My race was porked. The silver lining was that I was only about a minute from the mythical hidden pit area and I was able to swap out a new wheel and get back underway. As I took notice of the jerseys around me, I saw the same ones that I was with back when the race started. Doh! I had given up about 30 places. This actually wasn’t a very demoralizing development, because my goal for the first race was just to have fun, and I was still having fun.
I went back to work on the final two laps and re-passed a bunch of people… somewhere around 10-15 of them. Fatigue and attrition had set in all around and people were falling over, flatting, and riding off the course in spades, so passing really only required doing neither of the three actions above.
I tried to keep my pace high and charged as hard as I could through the finish line for my first finish and felt good about the race overall. I came nowhere near placing well, but the racing was fun, the competition was friendly, and the organizers put on a great event. Thanks all!
Here are a few pics that my buddy shot of my race, and a link to the lot of them on his website.
