Cyclocross - Santa Rosa Monkey Cross #1 report
Monkey Cross #1 - Doyle Park
Chance of rain: 70%. Chance of cyclocross race: 100%!
I like the races put on by Bike Monkey. They're friendly, well organized, fun, and a little less aggro than my normal series. The timing lets me sleep in a little later. Also, they have a bona fide women's singlespeed category, so I gotta represent.
In that category, there were four of us; two on mountain bikes, two on crossbikes. It's an "open" category, so it's hard to know whether your competitors typically race As or if this is their first race ever. Not until the whistle blows do you get to size things up appropriately. Even then, we were alongside the women's Cs, so occasionally it was worth checking a girl's back wheel to see if you had to panic or not.
The course was mostly flat, which was well enough! Lots of wide 180s, S-bends, a few asphalt straights aways (*vroom*), a curb to hop, and four barriers unevenly spaced in a turn which made timing a little funky and fun. Added to this were two whoop-de-doos down towards the river and back up: one easier but sandy, the other loose with bark and mud and rather disastrously steep. Discovering that I couldn't ride the second one seemed bad at first, but trying advice from Coach Lorri last year proved that I was much faster at running this entire thing, including the sandy bits. The only drawback was that by lap 5 I was having issues clipping back into my SPDs; another sales pitch for Egg Beater pedals echoed in my head. The rain started to drip down about halfway through my race, turning grass into grooved mud, making things slick, and splattering my new fishnet legwarmers. My bike handled well enough, tho I admittedly missed my tubulars and nice brakes!
The real kicker, tho, was how often I passed people. I took out two of the singlespeed girls pretty early, and I was under the delusion that I was in the lead -- right up until that fourth woman I lost track of screamed up behind me near the end and zipped around me. Oops, lapped! That's ok, I was a VERY solid 2nd, but still kept the gas on for the joy of wiggling around the geared bikes. It wasn't until I saw the results that showed that I had myself lapped the other two single speed racers plus maybe half the regular C field. Woah!
And I got me a medal and then a beer. Yay!
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More pics here, including when it got really REALLY muddy later on that day!
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-- gnat!
