OVCX 3: feeling good, riding bad, going backwards

This weekend was stop #3 of the 2012 OVCX series. It was anew course outside the town of Xenia, OH. Xenia is the town made famous by the movie Gummo.  If you've seen Gummo you can imagine my excitement to have to go to Xenia. If you haven't seen it, don't. It will depress you (and/or gross you out). 
I woke up feeling good. I slept well and felt ready once I got up and going. Once we hit the road, however, we ran into road closers, traffic jams, etc. I should have just turned around.

We got to the venue with no time to spare for my buddy Erik's race. He had to rush, but made his start. I had plenty of time for normal preparation and felt good warming up, etc. Admittedly, this course wasn't really my style, but I rode a couple warm up laps and wasn't feeling too bad about it. 

I guess I didn't fare as bad as that guy

But then the race started and all of my good feelings were blown away as if by the tornado that wiped out the town years ago, giving us Gummo. 

 

The course was on very rough ground, mostly flat and with pretty much all wide opened non-technical turns. The kind of course that favors strong guys with big raw power. i have good power to weight but only because I'm really light; I don' have big raw power.   

I'm sure there's more to it than just that, I think I just had an off day. I felt like I was really struggling to move forward all day and in fact in terms of positions, I was moving backwards.

And there was nothing I could do about it. People were coming around me and I just sat there and watched them go by. I couldn't respond. I just had no legs. I finished 25. I think that was the first time I've ever ridden myself out of the money. I've crashed myself out of the money a couple of times, but I don' think I've even finished outside of the money spots and not crashed and lost lots of time due to it.    

I'm happy I gutted it out because I really wanted to quit a few times. Plus at least I got to wear my new hi-vis helmet and I got some pretty good pictures out of the deal. That's about all I can say though. I wanted to forget all about this race, which was on a Saturday, so Sunday I went out for longer ride where I enjoyed being out in the Southern IN Fall. I met up w/ a friend on the road and rode w/ him for a bit (he had already been out for a couple hours), then carried on alone. It was a nice ride and I had good power. So even though I felt demoralized after Saturday, I was till able to turn the pedals Sunday. Whew.
This coming weekend is the OVCX classic Gun Club race in Cinci-nasty. It's one of the more technical courses and generally one of my fav's. The temps are dropping here, but I'm looking forward to a solid week of training and good race weekend. Then the weekend after that is Bloomingcross, the OVCX race here in town. I am part of the course design team for the race so I am stoked for it. We made a promo video for the race and I think it's really going to be a crowd pleaser (the race, that is). It's also Hilly100 weekend which means busy, busy, busy for me. But I'm pretty good at time/stress management. So no worries here.
Enjoy the Fall everyone; may favorite time of year!