I made my debut in the Expert Category this weekend and in my opinion I managed to have a respectable set of performances. Saturday’s course was very flat and had only very short technical sections, in the end it was basically a cyclocross time trial. I nailed it, with an average heart rate 176 BPM average for the 50min race. That’s huge, basically it means that there’s no recovery out there on the course and I really benefited from that, I really reeled some people back in during the final push to the finish. I overtook for fifth with about 400 yards to go and then was lucky with fourth trying to pass for a podium position and driving himself off into the tape and onto his bum. I just kept pushing my surge through the finish and took home fourth place only a second ahead of fifth and sixth!

Sunday’s race was a long paved climb and then a winding and sometimes flowy, sometimes technical descent on mostly grass. There was a long sand section to ride with a corner in it which proved to be a challenge and some really fun winding bits in a natural bowl in front of all the spectators. An excellent course to watch the race from. I started out knowing that I had to go really hard when I was going and do my best to recover during the flowy and fast descent. I found it incredibly difficult to push harder than my threshold effort on the climb without totally self destructing and starting to make errors on the descent. After 3 of the 9 laps I had resorted to backing off on the hard bits to only a threshold effort which I found was allowing me to make time on my competition on the descent instead of giving it away. I was following two guys quite closely and knew that I probably should be able to out-do them in the end. They got tired faster than me and eventually were caught taking it easy where they should have been working. I passed both of them and nailed the finish, moving up to ninth. Very respectable again considering the course was not designed to my strengths. I filmed the elite race, footage follows:

I’ve also been asked a lot of times why people would try and bunnyhop the barriers if there’s a way larger chance of screwing it up. Same deal with riding a challenging portion of sand, sometimes it is just as fast to get off an run and you’ll wind up less tired; why ride? The answer is simple, if you can do it successfully you are definitely the rooster amongst a bunch of chickens.

It’s the same reason that the caveman decided he was going to spend all day trying to kill a woolly mammoth for dinner instead of going out and collecting berries and digging up roots, an almost guaranteed way to stay fed. The chance that he’d return home to the cave with no food following a day of hunting was way greater, but the reward for coming home with a woolly mammoth leg over your shoulder is way greater: you’re a hero!