September 30, 2017
Today I answered some of the questions that were being asked: Are you racing this year? What’s going on? Where have you been?
On Thursday I made the decision to race this weekend. For whatever reason, I finally started to feel like racing again so I mounted up a set of cyclocross wheels and took my bike to a nearby park and practiced a few cyclocross techniques. Everything went well, I felt good so I signed up for a race in Lambertville, NJ (Hippo Cross) that I’d never done before. The event sounded fun so I figured let’s give it a roll and see how my body holds up.
The course was around a farm and had good features for my first event of the season (punchy hills, long straight drags without anything highly technical). Since I haven’t raced I was given a back row start position but I immediately jumped from the start and hooked onto the lead group where I hung on for the first lap before unhitching and riding mostly against myself for the remainder of the race. This was essentially what I anticipated as I had to “shake out the cobwebs” and get used to the intensity of racing and find out where I was in terms of fitness.
In the end, I was 11th. It was a good showing for me though; my lap times were very consistent throughout and I made no mistakes or blunders while cornering, shifting or bike handling. Most importantly, I had fun and caught up with a bunch of old racing friends. It turns out I missed racing more than I thought.