I'll Take What's Mine

So, let's make this quick. We'll strait up skip the back wrenching write-up from Firestone and get right to Fontucky. Friday XC was going smooth. Took things out pretty chill with last weekend still fresh in my mind and found a good rhythm over the first couple laps; continuously moving up. at the half way point I made a conscious effort to bring things up from 90% to full gas. Maybe five minutes after that point, I got a little too greedy and took too much speed with me into a rock garden and well, the rest is history. There are few sounds on the planet more frustrating than the air slowly escaping your tire mid race. put a tube in: flat again. Filled with grass: disintegrated. filled with more brush/scraps from cardboard box: still no go. I guess this is the cycling gods idea of a joke on the guy who spends too much time on Track&Field news. It was a long run to finish up. So, what do you do after a could have, would have, should have been race on a Friday afternoon? You scrounge together a sixteen tooth cog and some spacers and take your frustrations out on the single speeders the next morning. What a crazy sport that is. and yes, it's an entirely different sport in my mind. Stomping out 30 rpm's with the 16 on climbs just fifteen hours earlier I was struggling to turn over the 32 on. Taking five minutes to close a twenty meter gap on a fire road that on any other day could be sprinted across with five hard strokes in the 11. Then there's the whole arms and back requirement; I have nether. With some fresher legs it would have been hard. A week after rolling off a cliff and a day after running the course a few times with a bike on my shoulder, it was downright difficult. Props to Phat Marc and the rest of you nut jobs who do this full time.

Wicks likes his red heads White. Although there was that one exception. Sunday morning brought with it yet another trip into the pain cave. Back to back XC's are not usually the way to taper off for a Short Track. While everyone else warmed up I couldn't help but feel like I was still warming down from the last one. Needless to say, the legs were not all there. I guess it'd been a while since I've lined up for one of these things, and I forgot they start racing from the gun. oops. Last place is always a fun spot on lap one, if you're into swallowing large portions of airborne dirt and dust. I realized soon enough that if I spent the fist thirty minutes settling in, the race would be over before I started racing. Well, I don't know how, but things started to come together as the clock ticked on. A couple guys here and there and before I had time to think about how much I don't like Short tracks, I was up at the business end of the pack actually racing one of these things instead of just hanging on for dear life. It was a steady progression towards the front until Lyle came up from behind with four to go. I sat on his wheel as long as possible (not literally, that would be unsportsmanlike, and extremely uncomfortable if the wheel was in motion!) but he had other plans with one to go and went off like a bat out of hell, leaving me to dangle in just off the back. Still, not a bad showing.

Things are getting interesting around here these next few weeks. Now is not the time to go into detail, but new territory is about to be explored. Staring in New Jersey...