Saturday Night Fever

'Cross in August? Oh yes.

Cross is just so much fun, there isn't much more to say. The race was held at the New Jersey "state" fair. In reality it wasn't much larger than any county fair I've been to, but it was still DOPE.

The course was built inside the demolition derby pit. There were burrmed out turns, whoops, a stair case run up, a dirt pile descent, barriers and of course a few sections of mud. The course was short, .75km, but pretty fast. Oh, and it was under the lights.

My internet boyfriend was there and he P'owned his class. After a slow start up, he road his way through the field to a 4th place finish. I smell an upgrade coming.
My night began shortly after his ended.

The super elimination seemed like a good idea on paper, but with a large lack of foresight from the planners, it ended up being a dud.

After leading much of my first heat, my legs ran out of some punch and I faded to 3rd, just outside moving on to the next round. I got a second chance but soon realized that I was burying myself for nothing. I could move on to the next round but that would require me to bury myself again only using more of my legs up. With a 40 min main event later in the evening, I thought it'd be better to sandbag it and let everyone else use their legs up. The fact of the matter was, I didn't have the interval work required to keep a 5-8 min all out effort. It is only Aug. after all.

The race went well. I avoided the deck at the start as a few people tangled and one guy offered a karate kick to the middle of the field. That was pretty rad. Everything went single file pretty quickly. With a short course in a small area you could see where other people were. I held position in relationship to the leaders for a while. They eventually started attacking each other and lapped me. I wasn't paying any attention to time and didn't realize how many laps to go until about 5 remained. After a while it was me just trying to catch the guy in front of me. Staying full gassed as much as I could. Shit hurts so good yo.

My remounts were kick ass. I've still got somethings to work at getting over the barriers, but this was by far the most consistently best I've gotten over them. Yea that was an awful sentence.

Considering this race was the first time I was really on and off my CX bike since 'Cross Nats last year, I think it went super well. I finished 16th, a straightaway off of a top 15 finish. I'm pretty stoked on how things went.

The race was an excellent motivator to train harder. Also a good reminder of the small changes I need to make to my technique to become that much faster. I'm all kinds of amped up for 'Cross season.

There are lots of excellent photos over at my Flickr account. All of the photos were taken by Bill Moore, who is one of Christophe's friends. I met him for the first time at the race and he's a kick ass dude, who takes amazing photos. I hope to see more of him.

I'm switching over to the dark side this weekend in an effort to get Andy a W in his hometown circuit race. Should be an easy way to get some speed into my legs...