NC Cross #2

Nice short hour and half drive over to Cary, NC. Cary is the heart of the "research triangle", very upscale nice area, lots of new strip malls with the requisite chain restaurants and shops, parkways with developments off of them. I'm sure it's pure hell at rush hour. On a Sunday morning it wasn't bad at all. The race was in a nice city park.

Good course with a mix of asphalt, grass, soft trail in the woods, and dirt/stone paths. I'm not a big fan of the gravel/stone roads, the sound of stones pinging off of bikes isn't music to any cyclist's ears. The course had some good off-camber downhill turns that were tricky, a long run-up, one set of barriers, another dismount on an uphill off-camber hill that was so muddy it was unrideable (and not easy to get enough traction to run up either). Good temps and sun brought some more riders out, probably around 70 for the masters race. Some mid week rain left the course spongy in parts.

Starts have never been one of my strong suites but this year I've been doing OK. We started on a flat wide grass area, probably 20 riders across, after about 50 meters we hit a short steep uphill that narrowed to only allow 2 riders side by side as you dropped back down off the elevation. I hit the narrow part around 5th, the course went into some wet grass and then into a fast section thru the woods before you came out onto a deceptively hard section. It didn't look hard or seem like it should be hard but it felt hard. Guys were starting to let gaps open already. I had to go around a couple of guys to get back to the tail of the front group but I didn't last there very long. I just wasn't feeling the love. My legs felt OK, but I just lacked the drive to really give it everything. I'm in the middle of 2 week block of hard training before easing off for the rest of the season, so maybe that was it or it could have been 2 or 3 too many glasses of wine at a party we went to Saturday night.

Anyway I mostly fell back from there. Even lost out to a couple of guys I rode with the last two laps which is not typical for me. I usually have good endurance and can out last people who I end up racing around. I haven't seen the results yet, but I'd guess I ended up somewhere around 10th thru 12th. Now I've got to decide if I want to make the 4+ hour drive out to Boone for next week's race. It's suppose to be a real nice area of the state. I might go and do a metric century on Saturday that's on the way there, and then get a hotel for Saturday night close to Boone. If I didn't have Sirius satellite radio, I'm not sure I'd even consider spending over 8 hours in the car by myself for a bike race.

NC Cross Series Starts

Cross racing in NC ain't like it is up in the good ol' mid-atlantic. I had to drive over 3 hours to get to the first race of the NC cross series out in Salisbury, NC. There's a couple of races that are probably going to be 4 to 5 hour drives. Then again, races are $15 and you can go to the start line 5 minutes ahead of time to get a front row spot. Got to say I miss the crowds of the MAC. I think they had about 185 racers at Salisbury, it's like I stepped into a time machine and went back to the way cross was in the mid-Atlantic 5 or 6 years ago when I started.

Temps were in the 50's with a light to steady rain falling, perfect cross conditions. A good course in a nice county park with some slippy turns in the grass, a run-up, barriers, and an unrideable sand pit, good long paved road section, a fun section thru a woods. Thirty starters in the master's 35+ race. I wish they'd start the 45+ with us as well, so there would be a good 50 or 60 rider strong field, instead they start them a minute later.

Anyway, I had a good start and my old school green michelin muds were hooking up perfectly once we were in the fields. Coming to the run-up for the first time at the end of lap 1, I was in third and thinking this isn't so bad. Then it went shitty. I slipped and fell on the run-up, promptly dropping myself to the back of what was a group of 8 riders. Fast drop off, short pavement section, a couple of 180s and we hit the sand pit. Now I thought I'd be slick and use a not so obvious line to ride it, but like I said above, it was unrideable for the most part. Afterall, I was able to do it in warm-ups once. Needless to say, I didn't make it. This let a big gap open, so I spent most of lap 2 trying to close it with varying degrees of success. I quite foolishly tried riding the sand pit again the following lap in a bid to close the last few 10s of meters and get back in the group, instead when I botched it again I lost all hope of rejoining. So the front group ever so slowly pulled away and I rode most of the race by my lonesome. I kept seeing guys that appeared just behind me when we'd go thru a 180 degree turn but no one ever came up to ride with me. Finally a guy cracked from the front group and I caught him. We exchanged blows for a few laps and then he outsprinted me. So I ended up 8th. I'm not sure I had much more in me than that but it would have been fun to have stayed in the front group for more than a lap and seen what would have come of it.

Next week I catch a break as the race is only about an hour and half away in Cary, NC. Maybe they'll get a better turn-out as weather prediction is sunny and temps in the low 60s.

All is Right in the World of Cross Again

I don't know why they do it, but I've picked up that Belgians like to refer to a dominating performance as a "demonstration". Well Nijs put on a demonstration in the 1st Superprestige race in Ruddervoorde on Sunday, riding away very early. The week before he won the 1st World Cup race in Switzerland at the UCI headquarters in Aigle. Prior to that Nijs had a bad week or so where he kept crashing or getting crashed by spectators. His ride on Sunday was made all the easier since Albert and Stybar, who have shown they might be near his level, were going toe-to-toe in the U23 race rather than doing the elite race. Wellens, who is racing now, looks like he might be able to give Nijs a run if he is having a good day.

Nijs is putting some of his dominance down to using at altitude tent to sleep in at night. Let's hope he's not also on a full-blown Fuentes style doping program as well. That would be overkill.

I did the first race of the cross season over at Meredith College in Raleigh on Sunday. It's not part of the NC series but there was still a decent turn-out. I did the 35+ race. Not a great course, mostly riding around some undulating dry grass fields, pretty slow for the most part. Then again, it wasn't a bad course either. It was hard power riding save for a few spots to grap a couple seconds of recovery, I coughed for 5 minutes after the race. As I was collapsed on the ground recovering from a sprint finish, Atticus told me I didn't look so good, something about being dirty and sweaty. Jenny said they announced me as finishing 4th, although I didn't bother checking the results so I'm not certain about it. I'm pretty happy about being top-10, as that was my goal. I thought I was further back then 4th but it was hard to tell because of all the lapped traffic. Early in the race, several guys went ahead but then the group I was with seemed to be pulling them back and dropping them one-by-one pretty regularly. So maybe I did end up 4th. First race of the NC cross series is this weekend on Sunday.