Well, I did it again. Showed up at a race with a dirty bike and a race bag that had been thrown together that morning. I really need to stop doing that.
Today's race was out in Canby at a go-kart track/family fun center, surprisingly close and a nice change from the farm courses (nothing against farm courses, it's just nice to race on some different terrain).
In keeping with the Saturday races we had an absolutely kick-ass course and tiny fields. The A field contained a whole 11 starters. Regardless, the course was pretty flat but had everything from dirt and gravel roads to twisty-turny forest sections and even a river crossing. While I would have liked at least one big hill I'm willing to let that one slide because we even got to race on the go-kart course. Like I said, pretty awesome. Oh, and the 'barrier' section was killer. Major props to whoever found and placed those tree trunks, the spacing was prefect!
As far as my race, I was pretty unmotivated until the whistle blew, then I started caring, until I missed the holeshot that was mine and fell off the back of the group in the first 200m. Immediately, this got stuck in my head and I thought I was done for. And then I realized something, if I have the energy to keep singing a stupid song in my head then I need to ride harder. So I did. Over the 9 laps we raced I went from 10th to 5th, soundly attacking each person I passed to make sure they couldn't tag along for a free ride. I had a few small bobbles but saved it each time. I made a conscious effort to race hard the first part of the race and I did. I negative split the first few laps and then powered through the rest of the course. The only problem was I decided that I was feeling a little too good near the end of the race so I decided to kick myself in the Achilles when hopping the barriers. It's now swollen to the size of a small chicken egg; that's going to hurt tomorrow. Overall, I had a really solid race but am still lacking the punch I need in the first 400m. Oh well, my training has been focused on the longer stuff right now so the focus will begin to shift to the holeshot soon.
All in all an awesome day but I did realize one thing: my legs run on diesel, not high octane.
Sorry, no pictures but I'm sure there will be loads from Alpenrose tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment