Laatste Ronde

I raced my bike and I didn’t die – or suffer any brain damage. That’s saying something since I suffered a stroke during the last cross race I did which left me with a permanent blind spot just off the center of my vision. I’m cleared to race this year and I had been planning on lining up before this past weekend but a calf injury and a nasty cold left me sidelined. So this was the big return to racing.

I was pretty nervous driving to the race. I’m overweight and under trained and wondered what real racing conditions might do to me. I was certainly hoping that albuterol, which I discontinued using after the incident, was the secret ingredient for my stroke recipe. I’d never raced Rainer before though it had been part of the Cross Crusade for a few seasons and my pre-ride was an eye opener. Just riding the course at a moderate pace was hard. The circuit is dominated by a big climb, the first part of which is slightly loose dirt/gravel with the balance being pavement. I could tell the race was going to hurt and I just hoped that I wasn’t going to finish last.

Through the call-up and random seeding procedure, I staged perhaps third row. After the whistle blew, I held my own through the gravel and then started hemorrhaging positions as we turned onto the paved climb. People just flew by me and I had nothing to counter with. By the time we crested and turned onto the dirt, I was pretty far back and tasting metal in the back of my throat. I managed to hold my own through the rest of that first lap, eating the dust of over a hundred riders, until it was time to climb the hill again. The second time up the hill, I got passed by the balance of the field save a couple of souls slower than me.

Thom Kneeland passed me on the second trip up the hill and he gave me an encouraging pat on the back. I managed to hang with Thom through the second lap but he gapped me on the climb to start the third lap. Then I caught up through the rest of the lap, passing him on the bumpy off camber section prior to the pit chicanes. He was to be the only person I passed all day. Thanks Thom!

I was actually disappointed that Thom didn’t keep the pace because it would have been much more fun to have ridden with someone over the balance of the race. As it was, I rode alone the rest of the way unless you count getting lapped by most of the A field, some of the masters’ A field, and getting caught and dropped by by about half of the women’s A field. The hill was lined with folks cheering, ringing cowbells and generally causing mayhem. I was lucky enough to have a couple of cheering sections. And a note to Mike R., if you are planning on running beside me, it’s proper etiquette to give me a push.

After a few laps, I felt that I had sufficiently suffered enough to recall exactly how hard racing was. Perhaps I could drop out and regroup for next week. Maybe starting out with baby steps was the best idea with this return to racing. Sometime after I had had my fill of going up the hill, I looked at the lap counters and was dismayed to see 4. Four! Cripes, and Babcock, the race leader, had already lapped me so I was looking at how many laps really remained for me.

It was bargain time and I told myself that I would do a couple more laps before dropping out. And when I had done a couple more laps, I figured that I could certainly do a few more. And who knows, maybe Babcock would lap me again and I’d be done a little early.

I managed to be fast enough to not get lapped a second time by Sean Babcock and won an extra lap. I heard that he was about a minute behind me as I took the bell. Toward the end, David Diviney, another masters racer, came around me. I was determined to stay glued to him and try to get that lap back from him (figuratively speaking). Unfortunately, my calf gave a little twinge on the run up and I had to back off. I’m sure that David would have smoked me on the climb but at least I would have felt like I was racing for a few minutes.

I managed to place 39^th out of 42 finishers to avoid DFL. Hooray! I’m back racing and am looking to improve through the season. I hope to be pinning on numbers into December. See ya’ll next week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.