USGP Louisville Weekend

This weekend was the big USGP of Cyclocross weekend in Louisville at Eva Bandman Park, home of the 2013 World Championships.
What's extra cool about this is that they were using what is supposed to be the actual course for Worlds. I went down to LV Friday after noon to get a few laps on the course. I thought it was a good course. It wasn't overly technical, but the technical features were difficult. It had less open/flat stuff than this venue normally does, but still some.

It also had a couple of sand pits. One was long, but ride-able for the most part. It kind of went uphill/downhill a couple of times went from deep to shallow sand depths. That made it very tricky.  

 Friday after pre-riding I got checked into the hotel and then there's a number pick up "party" thing downtown. My hotel-mates were running late so some other friends and I went over to the party thing and got our numbers. Then we went to dinner, went back to the hotel and had another "party" and the hotel bar. The racing starts early in the day for us at these pro events, so it wasn't a totally massive night, but let's just say those guys can drink. 

I "earned" second row call ups for these races this year (via order of registration), which is awesome because think I've always started these races near 80-90th or so. I was pretty stoked to start at the front. Especially given that there was a run up, sand pit and fly-over  all inside of about 2minutes of the start. 
I got a good start and was ticking off some decent laps. But on one lap I biffed the last section of the sand pit and while I didn't actually crash I did end up stomping my foot into my front wheel. I wasn't sure what damage I had done at the time; all I knew was my front brake was dragging hard on my wheel. The good news was that I was only about 20seconds from the pit and my "B" bike. These types of things always cost you more than the actual time lost though. You loose some focus and that costs you as well. I soldiered on on my B bike and finished an okay 13th. And luckily I only knocked my wheel out of straight in the drop out. So there was no damage and it was fixable in like 5 seconds time. Nice (I like a no-money fix).      

Saturday night was another dinner/hang out at bar sesh. As noted before, those guys can drink. It's a good time hanging w/ them all.

Sunday the course had been changed a little. Most notably the aforementioned sand pit was run backwards. What this did was change it from ~3/4 ride-able to ~1/4 ride-able. And it was long pit which made it a long run on Sunday. And the section leading into it was a long open grass section, so you had to conserve energy leading into the sand, or pay the price.

I got a good start again and rode a good race. I really didn't make any mistakes and ended up 9th. Our team put 3 guys in the top 10 for this race. That's a pretty solid showing. I had a fun weekend and as you can see from the pictures the weather was awesome. It was in the mid 70's and sunny all weekend. People were walking around in shorts/t-shirts all weekend. We raced at 9:30am, so it was mid 50's for our race which is abut perfect. The pro's said it was too hot for them (it was 70's by the time they went).

This weekend it's back to standard OVCX racing in Lexington, KY. It's a far away race, but we're chasing series points here! After that (Thanksgiving week) it's a weekend off. And I'm ready for that. There's been a lot of travel lately plus I'll use the week of T-giving as a week "off" of training, which I will appreciate too. Oh, and turkey. I like me some turkey too.