On The Beat Down Beat

I raced yesterday, once more unto the Michaux Maximus... I took it as a training  race, which was good not only because I could use the experience -- it's been two years since I raced, or participated in any large-scale cycling event for that matter -- but also because if I had to take my results seriously I'd be pretty upset: I basically got my ass kicked, if not dead last then close to it, even in my age group.

It was a fun day though even considering the smackdown: the weather turned out to be perfect, and course conditions were as good as I've ever seen them there, dry (for the most part) but still pretty tacky where you needed it. The course itself (you can see my GPS track here) started a little different than the way I remember it, but it still hit many of the familiar trails: the Huckleberry, and the Fuzzy, and Dead Woman Hollow and Three Mile Trail, and it finished with the usual climb up the Log Sled Trail.

I really can't complain too much: my biggest problem right now is fitness (which I knew going into this, and which this is supposed to help address), followed by a general aversion to riding too close to other people -- I stopped a few times to let riders pass, and often paced the guys in front of me rather than muscling my way through -- but I think that this aversion could also be attributed to the fitness thing, since I blew up whenever I put out a truly competitive level of effort, especially in the first section, where there was a rapid succession of short steep climbs, so that ""fighting i n the pack" mentality really wasn't working ofr me.

I was more than a little gratified though -- shocked, even -- at how well I did on the technical stuff, especially in comparison to the people I was riding among. This was a real switcheroo: I used to be pretty bad at technical riding, and made up for it with better climbing ability;  yesterday, I struggled to keep my place climbing Dead Woman Hollow, got passed by a few guys, but then I utterly dropped them, and a few others, on Three Mile Trail.

They all caught me before the end though, either on the long, rolling dirt road stretch that came immediately afterward, or when we were climbing the final mile on Log Sled Trail, or at the point  in between, probably the easiest part of the whole course, when I suddenly needed to pull over and hurl. (Apparently I still have a few kinks to work out. When I got back I skipped the free meal...)

My ride time was about 3:15 and my time on the course was probably around 3:30, no worse than I expected but I do see I have some work to do. About par for the course.