Well, it had to happen sometime. I knew that despite my believed lack of fitness or technical skill I'd eventually need to toe the start line at an XC race if I hoped to ever jump start my "season". my first real, and logistically easy, chance was this past Saturday at the Maine Sport Mayhem! (their exclamation point, not mine). As usually happens for this race, the weeks leading up to the start had primo conditions which meant that things were dry and fast but, on race day, things changed. In the form of rain. lots of it in fact. This quickly turned a pretty nice course into a quagmire that was barely rideable in lots of areas.
There was a small but strong turnout for the race and a missed clip in saw me enter the woods 5th wheel with my main competition, Tony, getting the hole shot. By the mid way point of lap one I had passed all but Tony but he already had a comfortable 45+ second lead on me and with the conditions quickly worsening, I didn't have the mental fortitude to drill it to attempt to catch him. Guess I need to work on my mental game!
Anyway, after two of four planned laps, the race promoter asked Tony and I if we wanted to shorten the race to 3 laps which we were both happy to do because we could hear our bikes being ground into submission. In the end I finished 3-ish minutes back (i'm too lazy to see if results are posted) but felt good to get the season going and finally have a burning desire to race!
