Mansfield/Minuteman Weekend Race Report

Hey!  This blog took a little break for a while.  I was busy putting on Night Weasels, getting sick, sucking at Providence and getting married.  One of those three things I will write about later, try to guess which it is!

While I haven't had time to write, I have had time to add captions and fret over music choices for some chainstay cam videos, which are deserving of a better home than just my vimeo account.  So here we go!

Mansfield Cyclocross Race Report



The big difference between this race and Providence was that I knew I was under the weather going into this one.  I nearly got the reverse holeshot start, rode something like "hard tempo" all day, and eventually ended up going into the last lap with Tim Ratta and Patrick Collins.  There was a 16" single barrier (OLD SCHOOL!) that I had been hopping every lap, and a 12" - 16" set of barriers right before the finish.

What, you don't measure barrier heights with your skewer on preride?

Anyway, I hopped the single to start my attack, and hopped the double to finish the attack and not have to sprint against Tim, so that was a pretty sweet way to get a totally medicore 9th/22 place finish.

Minuteman Road Club Cyclocross

I did a fair bit of email consulting and mspaint-map-drawing with Russ about ways to make last year's course more balanced this year.  And it worked!  In that the course was much less of a cornering contest, and that I got dropped much harder and faster than last year.


Despite the fact that I was still feeling under the weather AND had raced the day before, I ended up hanging out with Mike Wissell for most of the race, which didn't make any sense.  I even went so far as to attack Mike with 3 laps to go, which certainly led to me hurting a lot more, but also led to Mike getting inexplicably better at turning and catching me about a lap later.

After that we "worked together" valiantly to try to put all the cat 3s in the race behind us.  We were not successful, although that's mainly because Kevin Goguen isn't really a cat 3.  The other cat 3's were vanquished once the clock struck 46 minutes.

Obviously I then repaid Mike for "working with me" by beating him in a sprint:
Russ Campbell Photo

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