US Grand Prix of Cyclocross

This weekend was the big one for cyclocross here in the Louisville area. The US Grand Prix of Cyclocross came to town. This series is as big as it gets for cyclocross here in the US, and is probably one of the biggest series in the world.

I learned a couple of important lessons this weekend. One, it is important to pre-register for big races, and two, starting in the last row of races that have 75 and 50 racers in them respectively sucks. My lousy starting position was due entirely to my not pre-registering.

Saturday morning I dropped Kate off at work and headed over to the old River Road Country Club for my 10 o'clock race. The categories for races this weekend were a little different from smaller races as the race that I normally do had basically been upgraded to the equivalent of a normal A race. I registered and was handed bib number 269 and headed out to warm up.
With warm up out of the way, it was time to marshall at the start line. When I got to the line, there was already a large group there, that was when they announced that we would be lining up by order of our numbers. So, I started in the very back (there were only about 6 guys behind me), and off we went. The start was the usual mad dash to reach the front as fast as possible and I think that I moved up about 20 places before we left the paved start area.

After having practically no rain for 3 months, October has been one of the wettest on record, due to all the rain we have had in the last week. This meant only one thing for the course, MUD, and lots of it (well, aside from the sand pits, but that is another story). There were a couple of crashes and a bottleneck at the barriers early on, meaning that the back of the field split off from the rest of the race really early.

I found that I was racing in my little ring up front for basically the whole race, the 44t chainring was just too big to push in all of the mush that we were riding through. The course had 1 set of barriers, two railroad tie runs up, and the Green Monster, which was a set of stairs on one side and ramp on the other that the races under under first and then over (it was really just a small bridge).

I was pounding away for most of the race until the last lap when I started to fade and was passed by a couple of other racers who had slowly been moving up during the race. In the end I finished 49th, which was kind of my goal of trying to finish in the top 50. Oh, and I did beat the one single-speeder in the race.

I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning my bike and changing the big ring from a 44t to a 42t.

Sunday I decided to drop down a race and do the cat. 4 race (mainly because everyone else from my new team (Bolla) was going to be racing this race), the only thing was that this race was the very first one in the morning, starting at 8:30.

Again I was handed a rather lousy starting position, 50th out of maybe 55 racers. At the gun we all took off and I was able to move up quite a bit on the outside. However, any hope of reaching the front was shot quickly as another racer went down hard right in front of about 2/3rd of the field.

The course had changed from Saturday, and while there was less mud, there was a lot more sand to ride through. There is not that much to say about the actual race, I tried to pass another racer on the outside, only to find that I did not have enough room, and being forced into the tape that marked the course. I hit a plastic stake holding up the tap snapping it.

Actually one thing I was happy about was that I did not crash either day, though Sunday I had a few bobbles that meant I lost my momentum and had to put my foot down to keep from falling.
In the end, I finished 14th, which was a pretty good finish, though I felt like I could have finished higher if I had gotten a better starting position. Changing my big ring helped alot as I was about to ride a lot more of the course in the 42t than I had been able to previously.

So, that wraps up the race reports, I will post pics of the elite races from Sunday later.