East Bay Cyclocross Livermore

Race Report: East Bay CX Series #2

Date: 12/17/05
Course: Livermore Rodeo Grounds. About 2.5 Km. No pavement at all, some gravel roads, dirt, grass, sand and even mud! Oh and the 30+ stadium stair run!
Category: “B” Class
Field: 20
Teammate: Chris L.
Place: 3rd

This was the second and final race for the East Bay series (Velo Promo). I had a solid week with a great single speed mtb ride with Dan and Greg on Wed. in the Marin headlands. Tue. and Thurs. rest and on Friday I did some jumps on the rollers. I felt ok but I never really know how I’m going to feel until I do some jumps on the course in the a.m. warm-up. Today I felt pretty good and thought I might have a good race.

I rode over with Geoff from Squdera and we arrived with time to recon the course. They changed the route substainually from last year. All the long open “road” sections were basically cut in half. The barriers, the stair run, and the rodeo ring were pretty much the same. I ran into Chris (to my surprise) I didn’t know he was racing and spoke with him for a minute and continued my warm-up.

I got a sweet front row start (no call ups) and were’re off. I had a bit of trouble getting my foot clipped in but managed to slot into 4th wheel and planned to sit in and ride it like a crit unless situations arose to change the plan. On the 2nd lap Chris attacked from behind over the backside barrier section while I was in 2-3? place. Nobody could chase so I jumped the gap up to him and the 2 of us with a hanger-on started to gap the field. After some timetrialing, around the 3rd lap or so we had a large advantage and I was feeling good. I was stoked, we had the advantage and the 3rd wheel in the group seemed to be having a hard time on the barriers. I knew I was going well on the remounts and started to think about race winning moves. I asked Chris if he was feeling good and could attack, but he motioned no, so I figured we would just sit in at tempo and run down the laps. Right then I noticed I had something loose on the bike and looked down to see my front wheel skewer flipped open! I managed to reach down and close it but it didn’t feel tight and was concerned it would loosen again. Well somewhere on lap 4 while I’m sitting behind the unknown rider it came loose again and I was looking for a good place to pull over and tighten it up. We came around onto the long backstretch and I HAD to pull over. As I was tightening up my wheel (with my frozen hands) Chris zipped by and I tried to get up to speed and latch on, but having to stop took the wind out of my sails and when I looked up I was down by like 400 meters or more on 1st … 300 to Chris. Dam, I couldn’t believe I’d forgot to tighten my wheel when I switched’em out last night. I was just happy it didn’t fly off and put me on my head so I tried to catch up. Well by this time the light rain we had after the first lap now had picked up and it was a “real” CX race! So I put my head down and tried to close…..

I wound up 3rd and can’t complain. I rode a good race and Chris finished in 2nd, I was strong over the barriers, up the stair run and generally felt better. I was having a little bit of a hard time with my right foot not clipping in, but it was later reviled that a lot of sand had jammed up on the cleat and that doesn’t work to good! I was disappointed to see Geoff on the sidelines yelling at me. He broke a spoke on the first lap :(

I’m not sure where I placed in the overall. They were going to group all B’s together for the overall. Masters, Jr’s, Women B, etc….. I’ll find out later, they will mail anything I might have won. They had payouts down to 6th…..I might be getting something, maybe not……

Well, I need to get to sleep. CCCX on Sunday, stay tuned…………………..