Sometimes you are the hammer.
Sometimes you are the nail.
And sometimes you are the wood?
I have no flowery words of rhyme or poetry, though. Just prose. I think my fitness might have been at least on par to last week, but other things were not. So even a competitive ride wasn't in the cards today. I had hopes that, racing against primarily the same field, I could produce a similar, or better, result. I felt more like a month had passed, and I think the masters field was double in size. By the third lap I was hacking up the remains of this tenatious lung phooey, and the week of lite recovery rides apparently hadn't been the right receipe.
The weather was great, again. Not really seeming true to the sport, but easy on the motivation. The course was technically challenging, similar to last week's two-dimentional intestinal map, but with some added surprises. A tad shorter, at about 0.7 miles per lap, the grounds were also more damp that I expected, and all the corners possessed a developing quagmire of soft mud and slime. The open grassy areas that could have been faster were mostly a handlebar fatigue test session, so approaching slick corners at speed was not a problem.
After a short stretch of pavement, the edge of a wildgrass field was skirted, again offering a meat-tenderizing excercise for the forearms and upper body. The added benifit was discovered on the third lap; my saddle clamp came loose. Really loose (I won't mention the "classic American" manufacturer of this post.....). I enjoyed a nice 20 degree rise, and a LeMond-esque rearward setback, in my saddle for the rest of the race. Another quick piece of tarmac, and another grassy run, which also contained the only set of barriers on the day (a set of three). Here the course gets interesting. After entering a third short run of pavement, a very shallow left bend led to a challenging gravel decent; a narrow park service-type path, rutted from run-off, packing tire-puncturing fist-sized chunks of stone, and then bending to the right as things turned to mud. The choice then became A) ride the greasy, rocky rut on the right, and risk crashing, but have head clearance, or B) stay in the slick and well-trodden mud to the center, and risk crashing, but test your limbo skills on-the-bike as you shimmied under a downed tree (kindly left by the course designers for our enjoyment - they insisted it wasn't downed intentionally). I tried the rut on the first lap, but opted to chance the limbo for the rest of the race. I never hit the tree, but I did tap the stem once with my helmet.
For the final kicker, we had a whopper of a run-up. While the service road went left, we had to cross the deepening (and quite muddy) culvert beside the road, and scramble our way up the steepest and longest run-up I have ever done. Foot traction was marginal, and if you had managed to keep your HR sub-ballistic until this point, all bets were off. I think I was only able to run the entire length for the first four laps. After shoudering the bike for maybe the first six times up, I took a que from the guys going up faster than I was (essentially everyone) and rolled it, with a hand on the top tube. This was easier on my back, and I actually ran it the final two laps. One guy in the "B" field was riding the whole thing; he finished 3rd. I didn't see any of the "A" field ride it, though a few tried.
Both the 3/4 fields and the masters fields were larger than last week, so the masters (again, 35+ and 45+) were started later. Because of my lackluster performance, and the short course, I got lapped by the 3/4 front-runners. I think the race ended up being 11 or 12 laps. Again, there were some DNF's, so I was hopeful of a respectable finish position. The posted results only showed the payout positions (five deep this time, for the masters - that figures....), so I was saved public embarassment. I'll wait for the full web results, and hope for a top-ten. I'm 19th of 29 in the masters 35+, after one race of four, of a total of 11 in the series. If I was a bettin' man, I'd.........well, I'd probably be unemployed.
UPDATE: posted results show my name twice; 6th and 8th. I'll assume the later. Series standings aren't up yet.
UPDATE 2: Sixth it is, and that bumps me up to 12th in the series, of 30 riders in the masters 35+.
JMS
