Not sure I'll ever become a 'cross convert. I like my cross bike. A lot. I love the flexibility it gives me in terms of when and where I can ride, the long wheel-base, the ability to tow a trailer or haul a baby-seat. I like the simplicity of a 1x drivetrain, and have given serious consideration to porting that setup to my road racing bike.
But racing it? Whoo. I'm not down with interval training. Give me a peloton and an open road, and I'm happy. Short, choppy straights with vertical walls and loose terrain do not play to my strengths.
The nice thing about the DCCX course is that it had a fair amount of open space. There were even 3 paved straights, and a couple of good long rolling grassy straights. I basically used those to make up for everything else.
I was called up to row 4 to start, not too bad for having basically no real cross racing history. I was on the far right, and the guy to my immediate left got a better start. Going into the first turn, I was trapped behind him, and I stayed trapped for about 4 or 5 turns. In that time, about 20 riders blew past us on the left, and I finally got enough space to get through. From there on, the whole race was all about recovering positions. I don't like racing like that--it feels pointless to work your ass off just to get back to where you started.
Coming into the iconic "W" for the first time, I was really shocked at how loose the first downhill was, and probably played it too conservatively every single lap. I kept the right line, more or less, and made it back up the sandy climb better than most of the guys around me, and that kind of defined most of the race: I sucked at the downhill, crushed on the uphill.
One particularly easy-looking turn on the bottom half of the course had me unclip 3 of 5 laps, and then just blast up the exit.
I also super duper suck at barriers, but got lucky with the barriers going uphill. Guys who were really good at them gained no particular advantage over my stop, climb on, and roll. I even picked up a few spots there and at the top of the stairs.
Ultimately I settled into a rolling group of about 5 or 6 guys, not quite pace-lining, but kind of pacing off each other (the hecklers made me very aware that we were kind of relying on each other a bit too much). The one time I found myself out in the open I started rolling too hard and had to back out. I can't see my heart-rate very easily, so it's hard to pace myself with nobody to chase.
By the 5th lap, I was too tired to try anything exotic. My ability to steer had basically gone away, and I think I cut a couple of guys off in one turn in an effort to keep the bike upright. Ironically, my speeds came up for the last half of the last lap, and my blast to the finish was good enough to have stayed in the top 25 times on Strava.
I ended on the lead lap, 2nd of 12 Cat 5 racers, 34th overall of 82 starters. If I cared enough about cross, I'd upgrade to Cat 4, where I would have been 12th of 38, but I just don't do this kind of racing often enough to get excited about it, and it huuuuuuurrrrts. Holding a 180bpm+ heart rate for 45 minutes is not my idea of fun, but I was very satisfied with where I finished, and for being able to lay down a pretty decent sprint at the end.
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The real reason why I signed up for this thing, though, was for Alastair to get a sense of big-pack juniors racing. There were also 82 people in juniors 9 - 14, and while he *just barely* made his start time (like literally rolled into the start corral as they blew the whistle), he was rolling strong and steady for the first lap, catching and passing members of his age-group. At one point he was as high as 6th, and apparently gaining on 5th. His heart-rate was glued to zone 5 like a boss.
Alas, in the 2nd lap he tried to ride down the W, got bounced to the inside, and went over the bars, landing hard on his hip and bending the right shifter over. He got up quickly, but was in a lot of pain, and had serious trouble controlling the bike. His lap-time plummeted, more than 2 minutes on just the 2nd half of the course, and he dropped to 19th of 23, one lap down. He has a big bruise on his left hip, but the bike was easily fixed after the race.
He was really irritated to have finished that way, but is actually looking forward to trying again next year! He said he was feeling really great until the wreck, and feels confident he could have put himself on the podium. That's an amazing improvement for a kid who's finished dead last in every prior cross race he's ever done. Even crazier? I think he's got the bug for cross. Uh oh.
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