First Cyclocross Race

Today was the first cyclocross race of the season in Louisville. The race was at a new location, a county park in the far southeast corner of Jefferson County, called Fisherman's Park. The first picture is of the one paved section of the course. The course was far from my liking, as it was extremely bumpy and much more suited I thought to a mountain bike race than a cyclocross one, with lots of off-camber corners, tight switchbacks, and basically no road sections that would have worked to my strengths.

I decided to do the category 4 (lowest level) race as this was my first race of the season and I was not sure on my fitness and ability (I have only ridden my cross bike twice so far this year). There were probably about 4o people in my race, and like all cyclocross races, at the start we all rocketed off trying to get the hole-shot at the first corner. I was probably in around 12th place at this time and was able to move up a few spots before the first really tight 180-degree turn. However at this point everthing just kind of collapsed in on itself and the whole field came to a complete standstill while people made their way around the corner. Once around the corner, I started to try and move up in the field and that was pretty much the story for the rest of the race, me trying to catch as many people as I could.

I did wipe out twice in the race, the first time at the barriers, which was on an off-camber hill and placed at a 90-degree turn into a hill run-up (in other words a really difficult location, and another poor decision in course design in my opinion). The other time I bit the dust was on a turn where my front wheel just slid out from under me and I went down pretty hard. It twisted my stem about 30 degrees out of wack, and so I had to quickly try to straighten it out. I was not able to get it back to its exact position and so I finished the race with my handlebars at a slightly off-center angle, which made steering kind of difficult. At this point I had two other racers catching up to me, one passed me on the backside of the course, and the other drafted off of me til we had about a hal-mile to go, at which point he passed me at another dismount. I was able stay with him till the final hill when I put in a sprint that dropped him, but I was not able to catch the first guy that passed me. That sprint really took a lot more out of me than I thought it would, because as soon as I crossed the finish line I looked for the nearest place to drop my bike and lie down. For a second or two I felt like I was about to pass out, but luckily I didn't. I did not stick around for results, but I think that I ended up in the top ten, which was a decent result.