USGP Weekend

This weekend was the USGP of Cyclocross in Louisville, KY. It was held at the new home of LV CX, Eva Bandman park, which as the sing notes will be the venue for the 2013 World Championships.
Me and some friends got a hotel ~1mile from the course and two of us went down Friday afternoon to ride the course before racing Saturday.
The course was awesome and a lot of really cool features. I've only raced on a handful of courses in the tri-state area, and I've only seen European courses on tv or the internet, but this looked like a true European course (which is good, because they hosting Worlds after all). It had steep downhills followed by short steep uphills (run-ups) and long flat fast sections connecting them and a couple sand pits and a "flyover" in between.

Our race is a combined Cat 2/3 race and as such had >150 riders in the field (which is waaay too many; they need to split this\is into two separate races). I had start #48 Sat and 50 Sun. So I was starting in 50th place both days, basically. The front row is all called up riders, so numbers start on the second row, w/ 8 riders/row. So I was ~7 row back; a pretty big deficit. I went in w/ the attitude "'ll do everything I can to start well, and if anything goes wrong in the start, I'll 'just ride it in.'"
Saturday I had an okay start and was moving forward the whole race. I managed to make it to 12th for the finish. I was able to latch onto a few different groups of riders and pick them of as the race unfolded. I was able to ride a clean race w/ minimal "traffic problems" and was pretty happy w/ the day.

Sunday went okay as well, but I got caught behind several crashes and/or botches. Add to that that I was feeling the previous day's effort and I had a worse day. I rode myself into 21st which is still okay, but not great.
All in all I had a super fun weekend though. Racing, hanging out w/ friends, etc. It was fun to get a hotel and make a weekend out of it. We spent most of the weekend hanging out w/ T O'D of Shamrock Cycles. We all went to dinner both nights in downtown Louisville, which is a really cool downtown.
So another USGP in the books. Looking forward to next year, assuming it doesn't interfere w/ Hilly 100 weekend. And w/ hopes of separate 2/3 fields.
This weekend it's back to Louisville for another OVCX series race. For some reason they're holding the race at the old USGP race site rather than using one of the country's only dedicated CX parks (if not the country's only CX park) and home of the 2013 Worlds. The old course is fine and all, but c'mon, we have gem here...
(photo credits to Luther Prater and Scott Bond)