DINO Logansport:3rd! (from last)

Dumpster.
That's pretty much how it went.
It was hot and I didn't feel great but I thought 'I'll hang as long as I can, and if I have to shut things down and "ride" the end of the race, I will.'
The start of this race is usually fairly chaotic. It starts on a wide opened gravel fire road and slightly downhill. The entire fire road is probably about 1/4-1/2mile long and very fast; lots of banging/jockeying for position.
I went into the woods in a descent position. Then once back out onto another double-track section I passed a few guys and found myself in the lead group. Nice place to be, except that whoever was driving our group missed a turn and the entire group went a couple minutes in the wrong direction. So we spent another few minutes figuring out where we went wrong and getting back to where we needed to be. Three of our group of (probably) 6 arrived at the right place before the rest (who took a different route to get back). Not wanting to take an advantage over the others, two of us waited for the them, while the other dude rode off ahead. I was torn whether to wait or not, as Cat2 men were getting in front of us and I didn't want a bunch of traffic to have to navigate later. But it seemed like the sportsman-like thing to do. What didn't occur to me AT ALL until after I finished was that while we were off course, the rest of the Cat 1 field had taken the turn as they should have and were now ahead of me (us). I guess I just assumed everyone took the wrong turn. So I rode super hard, and despite some cramping due to the heat, rode a pretty good race. I ended up 3rd from last though. All the people I had passed in the start/first 15minutes all ended up in front of me w/out ever passing me. Oh well, these things happen. And I found out later on the HMBA forum that there was a renegade kid out on the course taking down the trail markers; lil bastard cost me what could have been one of my better results of the MTB year.
Tonight I'm going to meet up w/ some dudes to help lay out the course for the planned weekly cyclocross training ride to start in the next week or two. Should be fun.