Quad Cross Race Report


Quad Cross Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo.
I kicked off my ninth (oh jesus, really?) season of cyclocross at Quad Cross this year.  They had flipped last year's course and it was so.  much.  better.  in this direction.  The punchy climbs were now fun euro-chutes and the long maybe-pedaling downhill was now a long pedaling uphill.

Wait, did I just praise a long pedaling uphill?  Yep.  That's how you know it wasn't a UCI race.

The miracle of pre-reg got me a front row start, which I uncharacteristically missed my pedal on. By the time I was going faster than the people around me, we were into the first turn and I decided not to doing anything dumb trying to move up (see:  not a UCI race).

I may have chopped Mike Wissell anyway, just out of habit.

I spent most of the first lap waiting for the race to start hurting, which is what happens when you haven't raced cross in a year and your legs got torn off at the last race (Dirty 40) so badly you didn't want to write about it.

Eventually I was like, whoa, I feel strangely decent (probably because the course was mostly technical sections) and I started moving up.

I moved up until I got to Tim Ratta, and we were racing for fourth.  My plans of drafting him on the doubletrack climb were thwarted by him attacking me with the fury of a thousand suns every time we got onto said climb.  Turns out there IS a limit to how hard I'll sprint to stay in the draft.

After the climb was a good five minutes of technical cornering so I was able to undo the damage each lap in that section and get back on his wheel, just in time to get to the power climb and get attacked again.

This seemed like a recipe for not getting fourth (I had even told myself "it's ok little buddy, the money pays five deep"), but I forgot that on the last lap I my ability to suffer is basically triple what it was before.  So this time, I went with the attack, and counterattacked at the top into the hairpin that marked the start of the technical section that had been getting me back onto his wheel all day.  And then it was basically a "don't screw up" contest from there.  Which I won.

Thus marks my traditional "better than you really are" race.  Gotta love technical local races when everyone fast is at a UCI race or raced the day before!

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