Wrentham Bandit Cross

Wrentham Bandit Cross Bar Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo.


I recently made the questionable/awesome decision to fly to Tennessee next weekend for EVEN MORE UCI CROSS. Therefore I am putting off the nordic season for another two weeks (yeah, am I even a skier at this point? Not really) and trying to resurrect 60 minutes of race fitness from whatever you want to call the insanity that's been the last two months of my life. Oh, this is going to go SO. WELL.

So in between riding the trainer and trying to relearn how to sleep eight hours a night, I headed to Wrentham for some bandit cross at the old MRC race venue, organized by Gewilli.

It was a snowy morning, which meant that a) getting out of the house was really hard, but b) the riding was actually AWESOME. With shovels and tires we beat in a 4 minute lap into the bumpy and snowy hillside and got to some Euro-style racing in two 20-minute heats.

Myerson and Jerome Townsend were there, but elected to start at the back, so I ended up leading the first 1.5 laps of race #1. I could hear Jerome closing on me so I decided to ride more aggressively, which led to slipping a tire on an uphill corner and then coming unclipped and bouncing my knee off my stem. OW. OWOWOW. And that was that. I slipped back to 4th, chased Brant Hornberger around for a while, and then got sloppy when I caught him and couldn't make any kind of challenge for the last "podium" spot. Weak.

Race #2 was the same course, but backwards, which actually had a ton more braking and rode totally differently. Once again, holeshot, held it for 1.5 laps, managed to block Adam out of a pass and force him to dismount... but who am I kidding, I'm riding unsustainably hard here. Two minutes later I had the inevitable bobble and the top 3 went by. This time, though, I rallied with some clean riding for once to catch back onto Donny Green (who had ridden up from Providence!!) and race for 3rd. With one to go, he was getting sloppy in the snow and I recognized (for once) that I should attack. So I did. And wrapped up a "glorious" 3rd place at WRENTHAM BANDIT CROSS.

It was actually totally sweet conditions for racing, if you missed your snow-cross fix this season you should really head down there next weekend to play bikes.

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