Eastern Grind Race Report

 Another one from the "I banged this out for Team Slack" files.   Eastern Grind (Williston VT) is a cool XC mtb race so I wrote about it.

Eastern Grind Race ReportOk this course rules, it's has enough climbing to whoop your ass but half of it is actually super fast flowy stuff so you think you're riding like really fast, at least until you realize that every time you see Harry he is a little further ahead so actually everyone is riding super fast.  But anyway it's good, you should have been here unless you were @Harry Gordenstein and @Luke Plummer because they WERE here.There was no pro field, just "expert open men" so all the super fast guys ended up in our category (boo) but that meant we had 24 dudes (yay!).  The start was FAST because of aforementioned pro dudes and I did a shit ton of work just to end up in... last place after 90 seconds.  I talked about how we were going unsustainably hard and the guy in front of me agreed.  Harry was only like 4 guys in front of me and I assume he agreed too.  Luke was already 10 guys ahead of me and has never found a pace to be  "unsustainable" so I assume he was fine.In the first ten minutes two dudes succumbed to "unsustainable" so I got out of last place only to get PASSED LIKE WAS STANDING STILL by Greta Kilburn, who made up 1 minute from the women's field on me in like 9:45 of racing.  I let her by, rode uncomfortably fast down a descent trying to hold her wheel, and then got immediately dropped the second the descent ended and never saw her again.  She eventually beat all but 6 men and finished 10 minutes ahead of me.Harry remained in sight for a while and I tried to convince myself I was easing into racing well, but I had to admit that by the end of lap 1 I was not seeing a lot of Harry on the trails ahead of me.  I did pass another dude putting myself THREE PLACES AHEAD OF LAST which meant I was meeting my goals for the event.Lap two was the normal middle-of-the-race lap where your enthusiasm for smashing has worn off and the finish is not near enough to make you want to go hard.  I passed two more dudes on this lap though which was cool.    I saw Harry at the start of the lap on one of the longer climbs and he was like 50 seconds ahead, which was not cool.Near the end of lap two I got passed by the lead 45+ guy who was Andy Bishop, Andy Bishop has finished the Tour de France 3 times and has his own Wikipedia page so I'm okay with that even if he is 59 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bishop_(cyclist)).  Unlike Greta he did not make me feel stupid descending which I was grateful for.Starting Lap 3 I saw Harry again at the same distance as I had seen him on Lap 2 so this meant I had stopped the bleeding but now I only had one lap to make him BLEED HIS OWN BLOOD if I was going to avenge my Great Glen/Secret Squirrel defeats.  But also riding bikes was hurting me a lot as it usually does after an hour, so I mainly rode along and hope he would crack harder than me.Halfway through the lap the leading junior caught me at the top of the climb and ALSO failed to Greta me on the descent, and then we were done climbing so his svelteness was no longer an advantage, and thus we could smash the flat twisty parts together.  We shared the common goal of going fast, I wanted to go fast to catch Harry and he wanted to go fast to get rid of this 42 year old man that was drafting him.  However he was being a junior and spraying watts all over the corners instead of being a smooth cagey old man, so I kept getting back onto his wheel despite all the passionate pedaling.During this time Harry was spotted at definitely-less-than-50-seconds ahead so progress was being made, however the end of the race was getting annoyingly close.  The child and I continued to battle pointlessly yet heartily and surely we were near to catching Harry by now, right?  I kept looking through the woods for a B2C2 jersey but sadly never saw it, and when we got to the final doubletrack he was still not in sight.  It was clear I had lost and my only option was to take out my frustration on the child who had been pulling me around for the last 15 minutes.With 100 meters to go I jumped out of his draft, started sprinting, drew next to him... then realized that 100 meters on bumpy false flat grass is way further than I thought it was and blew up.  So he beat me in the sprint and also by like 2 minutes on the results.Despite all my failures I was actually totally satisfied with my pacing and performance, I got as much out of my body as I could, paced it well, and didn't make any mistakes of note so if you can't be happy with that, what's your problem?In case it is not clear I would recommend buying Greta's stock if there is an IPO.  Also you should do this race next year.

Comments

Julia said…
Fun read. Hi to Harry.
8/20/2024 10:00 AM
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