Friday, January 13, 2012

The good, the bad, and the ugly: CX Worlds 2012

The good: my preparation. As for the bad and the ugly, well those are the course and as a result, my race.
My preparation and general lead up felt good and felt 'right' for the most part. Things seemed to fall into place as I would expect for a good race. My fitness was good but unfortunately, for me, it wasn't really a test of fitness.
We went down to Louisville Wednesday to pre-ride the course and get our numbers (or "accreditations" as they called them). When we got to the venue we weren't sure if we would be allowed on the course to ride or not. There was a good deal of standing water and it (obviously) it was very soft/muddy/wet. We walked most of a lap then suited up to ride. Other people were riding, so we figured the officials were allowing it. It was almost 60 and misting rain. The course was good and hard; I liked it.

(ruts across the entire course, but not frozen)

We went and got our numbers which were assigned via a random draw. I drew 18. With 8 per row, this meant a third row start. Not ideal, but the start straight was long and I was feeling confident; I wasn't too concerned (and as it turned out, I was somehow 2nd spot of the 2nd row anyway, not too sure how that worked).
Thursday was a full day of heat races. I worked all day, but kept tabs on what was going on at the races. It was 50+ and raining all day as it turned out. The course conditions deteriorated to such a degree that the heat races were eventually shortened to just 2 laps to not completely destroy the course. After reading this I wasn't really sure what to expect for our race the following day. It was supposed to be below freezing over night, but warm to around freezing during the day (our race was at 1pm). My thought was that the course would freeze over night, then begin to thaw and get totally churned up by the heat races that took place prior to our race.
I was wrong (as were the weather reports). It froze over night, but it reached a blazing high of ~26. So the muddy racing the day before left the entire course nothing but frozen-solid ruts. I can't describe how difficult this was to ride on. It was nothing but ruts from tape-to-tape that were parallel along the course and ~3-5" deep. It's a helpless feeling when you are trying to ride on a straight, flat piece of terrain and you simply can't go straight and are pulled off line, but onto more ice and then hit the ground. I ran more than I ever have in a (non running) race. Plus I fully crashed 2-4 times (I can't really remember how many). It was a terrible race. I guess a good CX racer is one who can be good on all/any conditions. Well I sucked horridly on ice. And those who were willing to throw all caution to the wind, be willing to break bones/bikes are the ones who prevailed. I wasn't able to do that.

(this is basically concrete. I cannot describe it)

I felt good going into this race and had a high expectation for myself. I failed at that. But being part of the first CX World Championship to be held outside of Europe is a pretty cool thing. There was a Belgian, a Brit, a Spaniard and a German all in our race, but it really hit home to me that it was truly international when the starting official gave us the "2 minute" call. He was an official I'd never seen before and when he called out "two meenoots" I got the feeling he wasn't from around here.

So though I am disappointed with my race, I'm trying to keep perspective. Given how fast those top guys were, there's no way I was going to win anyway, so I need to just be satisfied having participated. And as you can see from the pic above (which is not me btw) the sun did come out and the course did thaw. I wold have far-and-away preferred mud to ice. I think it's probably true that we had some of the worst conditions of the event. And hey, I finished and got a finisher's medal to prove it. Now I take some time off. This week is no working out at all. Other than my commute to work, I won't ride in order to rest up. Then next week I plan to start some lifting and general strength stuff, then get back on the bike some either late next week or so. It's crazy that it will likely be into February before I start back riding. I usually take my time off and do some strength work in December/early January. I guess that means I need to start thinking about the spring/summer of racing. Dang, I just finished racing a couple days ago for 2011...

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