 |
Headed out to Hudson for the Big Ring Flyers Cyclocross race. Cyclocross is a crazy sport where you do short loops (this loop was 1.56 miles) on a bike that looks like a road bike but has knobby tires. The terrain is off-road, mostly single track, and there are multiple points per lap where one must dismount the bike and carry it over obstacles. Whoa, is this sport a 5 on the intensity scale. It’s like racing a 5k but on a bike, which makes the small amount rest you get on the downhills and turns motivation to sprint very hard on the flats to maintain your position.
I wanted to get a good warm-up in because I knew it would be continuous, hard sprinting. What I didn’t know is that lots of guys line up early in order to get the hole shot. I showed up at the start line about 5-7 before the gun and there were already 50 guys in the box. Not knowing what to expect (I had only raced one other cx race, last year) I choose not to fight my way up. I passed maybe 15 guys on the first lap but I was blowing up doing it, sprinting around guys on the outsides of turns that could be negotiated by barely pedaling if on the inside line. After the third lap I figured I had passed about 25 guys, 15 on the first lap and maybe 5 the next two laps.
Then I heard the bell, and since it’s a short race and I didn’t want to regret not trying. I passed another 3-4 guys during my 190BPM efforts to the finish. When I got to the finish line I hear a much louder and more mature church bell, and one of the guys I hard worked so hard to pass flew by me at race speed. Uh oh, I’m in for another 9 minutes of pain! We were still racing. Some fan had a cowbell and was ringing it to cheer, it was not the real bell lap until now! My legs were really hurting and I couldn’t keep up the pace, I hard to slow down.
Fortunately after about two minutes of struggling my legs came back underneath me to some extent. I felt strong, but had certainly lost an edge, there was no fire left, just good pedaling power. I had no idea where I sat but I knew the leader were way ahead of me.
I rode an average pace the rest of the lap, and Kelly kept yelling that a group was forming behind me. I didn’t care. I was doing what I could. If they had enough to pass me, my lungs were seared, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Coming into the last straight away I was able to muster up a decent enough effort to hold them off, barely. One of the guys passed me right after the line. I finished in 21st of 58. Not a great result considering I was racing CAT 4, the slowest of the 3 categories in the day’s race. But it was all I had, and that was good enough for me. Such a tough challenge.
I’ll be back for more, probably next weekend.
|