West Hill Shop Race Report

I made this video on Tuesday and I thought I was going to blog about the race but then... I don't even know what happened.  Let's pretend I have kids and they got sick or something.



West Hill Shop CX Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo.


ANYWAY the video is nice, you should watch it.

I made the lead group on lap one, which was cool, because it had roughly half the field in it, but not cool because I was the weakest dude there and guys wanted to pedal hard (shocker).  So I made some big efforts to stay attached, and it turns out there's a price for that, especially when you have to run up a freaking wall right after the big pedaling section.

Soooo eventually I got sawed off the group and rode around by myself, trying my little heart out, until I realized two dudes chasing (Eric Follen and Craig Calhoun) were steadily taking time out of me.  When they got to within 5 or 10 seconds with 3 laps to go, I decided that I would rather hang out with them than continue TT'ing and probably get caught anyway.

Hanging out was a lot nicer it turns out.

Eric seemed to be driving it and putting us under pressure, so I encouraged Craig to "close that gap" because that's the kind of game I play when I don't feel like making a pass to do extra work (aka "all the time").  Craig closed said gap and then we dropped Eric right after that, so man, I don't even know what was going on.

In any case it came down to a sprint between Craig and I on the road, which is the 4th time in 6 times at Putney this has happened to me.  You might think I have it dialed by now, but apparently not, because I almost crashed into the ditch at the base of the runup and then smacked my bike on a tree while freaking out. (watch the end of the video)

That being said I did win the sprint for the first place out of the money.  Yeah!

I must say the new version of the Putney course, with turns in the field instead of just riding around the perimeter, is a much less horribly painful bike race, and has the nice side effect of making the lap length reasonable, too.

Comments

a said…
Awesome video - the commentary was key.
bikenerd said…
You have a strong honor system out there. If we used that little tape to define a course here in NorCal, riders would be darting all over the place like startled cats.

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