Gotta love the mud

You know what I hate the most about racing in the mud? The clean up. I mean really, the racing isn’t all that bad, you just kinda get used to it. But the clean up is never easy. Even after you scrub yourself clean, you keep finding mud hidden on your body for days. And mud is almost impossible to get completely out of your shoes. Yeah, it’s stupid.
We rode the course yesterday, and it was muddy, but not all that bad. However, it rained over an inch and a half last night, and yeah, that doesn’t really do good things to race courses.
I started warming up, and my legs were feeling pretty good. There were a lot of people there though, and I started freaking out because of all the competition. I got to the line, and there were about 30 people in my class alone. The pro, semi-pro, pro women, jr expert men AND women, all started in front of us on a very short course. I got a pretty good start, and ended up going into the woods in 3rd position. I passed two guys, got passed by another, noticed that he was sketchy on pretty much everything, and then passed him right before a gnarly rock downhill section. I put about 10 seconds on the field on that one section alone, and knew that it was going to be a good day. One guy, who I had been talking to on the line, came around me, and straight took off up a stupid steep climb. I tried to keep him in sight while also keeping my heart rate down, but that didn’t work out so well. The 3rd place rider ended up catching me on the second lap, and we rode together for the next lap. I could just barely see the leader every once in a while, and the two of us were working together to bring him back. There was a moment that I was straight struggling to keep up with him, and almost dropped off, but decided to put in a little more effort to keep on his wheel. I ended up dropping the guy I was riding with on the third lap without any effort, which made my job a whole lot easier. I rode that lap chasing the leader, and pulling him ever closer as we hit some serious lap traffic. I finally caught up to 1st on the first climb of the final lap, and settled in behind him to recover from the chase.
I noticed that I was riding the descents a little faster than him, so I figured that I would use that to my advantage on the final downhill. I attacked with 3k to go (usually I would measure in miles, but there was a sign right there that said 3k, so that’s all I know), right at the top of the mountain. I pushed the descent for all it was worth, passed a whole bunch of riders, and had a clean run down the rooted out downhill just before the flat to the finish. The final section of the course ran around a lake, which was fine yesterday, but today was covered in water from the rain. It was run on a little walking path, and there were people fishing and picnicking right in the middle of the course. It was awesome. Anyway, I pretty much sprinted for the final mile, and ended up winning my first expert race by around 10 seconds. I was pretty stoked. We were driving back to Brevard that night, and as it was, we weren’t going to get back to town until around 2 Monday morning. To add to the insult of the late night, it started pouring about an hour into the trip. We ended up stopping at a hotel for the night, which, when coupled with pizza and Family Guy, was a really good call. So yeah, back to class tomorrow for the final week of classes. I am really really really really looking forward to this next weekend, and then the end of classes after that. Stay tuned! Oh, you should go look at my Facebook to see the pictures from this weekend…