This past weekend was the Moser Farm cross race. It was the warmest day in a while and it was perfect for a race. The course had some interesting features to it. I guess most of the features are still pretty interesting to me since I have only done a handful of races. There were two fairly steep hills that had barriers at the bottom. Each run was at least 100 feet, with a sharp U-turn at the top. Nothing like a 10 second run in two parts of the course to mess up a rhythm! There were two other sets of barriers in the course making a total of four dismount points. There was another spiral which was quite a bit smaller than the one at Smith Farm, which I was fairly thankful for. The rest of the course was wide open and flat minus one big climb and one large sweeping descent.
The start was pretty cool in that we started parallel to the finish straight, went a couple hundred feet, then made a hard 180 onto the finish straight. The first climb was a running race since no one wanted to take the time to clip back in over the barriers on the first lap as every second in the first minute of racing can lead to minutes lost later in the race. During the race many people jumped back on their bikes and rode up the hill including me but it was too risky a move for the first lap. I was able to find fourth place and pull away from the pack a little. The first three places took off and I tried to catch them through the technical sections in the course which worked fairly well. On one downhill a rider in the top three, went down and I was able to catch them. Two of them pulled away through the second lap and I was able to pass the one that went down.
I had a nice intense battle in the middle of the race for third. We were drafting off each other and attacking. At one point I tried to make a move when the other rider let me by so he could draft off of me. He slowed down at the top of the climb, and next thing I knew I was up beside him. I kind of figured he would try this because he tried to let me pass on the down hill so I could pull him up the hill. When I got around him on the left, I dove right so as to break the draft that he was so desperately trying to ride in. I laid down a couple of attacks but in the end he was able to get the better of me by about 20 seconds. The rider that went down earlier even passed me with three laps to go. I tried to hang on his wheel but could not quite reel him in. The laps ticked down and I had one to go. I wanted to close some of the gap on the first hill and then if I planned my attack correctly, I could finish my charge through the spiral. In the previous two laps I was able to close the gap in the spiral so I thought it would be a great spot for a final assault. Right after the finish line he dismounted to go over the barriers on the first long run. He pulled away over the barriers and then tried to mount his bike. He could not clip in and fumbled for two seconds. I thought that it was now or never. As I ran past him I heard a mumbled bit of frustration under his breath and I knew I had him up the straight. The rest of the lap was filled with adrenaline. He was chasing me and there was no way I wanted to give up a position at the end of the race. I was able to pull a way a little on the uphill section and watched him through the spiral. I was expecting a massive charge at the end and I did not want to have a 30 mile an hour sprint to the line. I was able to keep a cool head and had no real mistakes on the last lap and was able to come away with a 4th.
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