Hometown Racing...(and working)

 Man, it all started a couple months ago. The leaves on the trees were still green, and we needed to lay out the course for this past weekend's Bloomincross race.

This was the holy weekend in Bloomington Cycling: Hilly 100 and BloomingX. That also means it one of the busier weekends of my year. It means working on my feet w/ repetitive heavy lifting for ~23hrs in three days...and then trying to race CX on top of that. It's awesomeness at its awesomest.    

Hilly 100 went well. Friday night was cold and rainy. Saturday was not quite as cold, not rainy, but cloudy. Sunday was just about perfect. My work partner, Josh, and I were a little off of our last year's $$ amount, but did well. We were super busy like we always are, but it's fun and a nice change of pace from the shop setting. 

I'm always very unsure of how I'm going to race after working Hilly. I feel okay, but I have no idea how my tired body is going to respond to being pushed to 100% effort for an hour. It seems stupid to even line up, but it's my home race so I have to. 

I didn't have a great start, I came out of my pedal for the first time ever. But I got my crap together quickly and rode a really good race. I felt myself struggling around the 12-20min mark, but I dialed back the effort a bit and rode steady/hard. I ended up battling back and forth with my friend Will and I beat him on the line for 16th.

 

Not my best finish ever, but not bad. And if nothing else, at least I got this borderline "epic" sprint picture out of it. 

As  you may recall this course was the design of me and a few other local X'ers. I was very pleased with how it turned out and I got nothing but good feedback from it. it made me exceptionally proud. I msg'd the promoter and told him that getting so much positive feedback on the course felt like watching my child grow up to be successful. He, having kids, said he understands what I mean. Of course, we just have cats and they're not going to grow up to do much of anything except puke all over the place. So I guess I'll have to be proud of course design.   

It was a great weekend overall. One for the books. Seeing old friends at Hilly, hanging w/ friends I see all the time at the race, racing, then hanging w/ more friends at a post race bonfire-party-thing. Good times.

This weekend is the OVCX race at Eva Bandman CX park in Louisville. I haven't raced here since the Master's Worlds last year. And it's the home of the Elite Worlds this year. It's a cool venue and I usually like to race there. They have a lot of options in terms of how they can set up a course and it sometimes has more flat/opened/straight crap than I prefer, but that's CX. I'm looking forward to it all the same.

The fall weather is totally awesome here right now. I hope you all can enjoy it however you do.