Great Legs, No Results: Saturdays Race Report

Saturday was the Boulder Racing CX Series kick off. They always have a pretty nice race setup. The races are well attended, there's music, announcers and extras. Saturday was at Xilinx in Longmont, a Colorado CX standard. For this first race, the director was doing call ups based on last years Boulder Racing Series points and some how I missed all their races last year. So, no call up for me. But I still wanted to race, to see if I could still move up from behind.

The coarse was a little over the top. Rough, narrow and too many wheel eating ditches. You had to be fast but patient and smart. I got a 5 or 6th row start (mid pack out of 98!! Starters). There were way too many racers clogging the road to move up quickly and the first pass through the narrow trees at the top of the coarse was mayhem. Once through that section I started to move up a bunch of places on the road at the top of the course. Once the decent, the fastest part of the course, coming back to the front side of the Xilinx campus there's a little off camber section at the bottom. The two guys in front of me total wimped out and slammed on the brakes. I had two choices, hit them HARD or try to drop down the off camber and see if I could ride around. I tried the later only to have my wheel wash out sending me ground hard. It was fast and I went all the way down to my head, knocking one of my helmet "rockloc" straps out of the helmet. Once I figured out were I was and got my stuff back together got got back to work, my helmet was flopping all over the place on the rough trails.

The next few laps I was killing it. I couldn't believe how quickly I passed some people. The race was shattered and I was moving up fast. The body was in go mode. On what turned out to be the last lap (I didn't know it them because the announcer sucked [who was that clown, playing 80's music during call ups, couldn't hear a thing] and their bell must have been broken) I caught the lead chase group. They were racing for 4th. I couldn't believe I had chased back from mid pack to the front. At the top in the trees I decided I would try and get over the downed tree by riding it, it worked when I practice road the coarse. If it worked I would be in front of the lead of the group and could attack on the pavement just out of the trees. Sadly for me I when over the bars straight onto my hands for my second huge wreck of the day. This one took a little wind out of my wings.

I tried to chase back those places and if I'd had one more lap I may have gotten them but it wasn't to be. So I finished 11th despite the poor starting location. I felt great, the legs were strong and I dished out some pain. Sadly a lot of that pain was on myself. In the end, I just lost some skin, bruised my hands, arms and shoulders. I would race again Sunday but feel like I got hit by a truck.
There were a lot of cameras at this race. I'm sure someone got the shot of my crashes. If I find them I'll post an update. Someday I may find myself of sports bloopers or funniest videos.