Dan Action

I’ve Been To The Races Too. October 6, 2008

I will tell more of these stories starting from a fresh keyboard which is destined to be under my fingertips tomorrow morning, but for now I will let all who are interested know that I still do race cyclocross and still, I enjoy it like I enjoy nothing else.

Charm City is another name for Baltimore. The act of charming people is probably devious the way that I think of it, which is sort of like hypnotizing someone, or maybe like one would charm a snake. Either way, I call it dubious. If I seemed entranced at this race of the same title, it was because I was at it from way too early to probably way too late. Lenore can attest to it as well. The race went ok for me, being the first race and all. I had a good start and went onto the course in the top ten or so. I found the right lines and quickly gained ground. You can probably read a decent re-cap on the results page from the race, or wherever else you see something about Charm City cx race posted. I got a good mentioning in the write up. Though, not mentioned was the reason I fell from the fight for 3rd. Like a dumb dumb, I put my head to to wallow in pain for a second, or to make sure my shoes were still on, which ever you prefer, and set my front wheel in a big hole. That shook me up and in the couple of seconds it took for me to make the mental check to be sure I wasn’t going down or I didn’t hurt my beautiful new bike, Steve and Andy attacked. All I could counter with was holding the gap where it was and riding parallel. Too bad. But fifth is not too awful, I enjoyed the podium low point just fine and still walked off with some change it the ol’ pocket.

Hillbilly Hustle. I got an awful start due to my slowish reaction time to the start whistle. The official made no attempt at a countdown and as soon as “on my whistle” was said, it blew, then I bewilderdly tried to reach my pedals. I went into the woods 12 wheel or so on a course that bottlenecked fast and got all single-file like. I made some dicey moves and some less risky to get up as many wheels as I could see, which found me riding with Rickey from the Exodus team, then followed by 15 yr. old phenom., Jeff B. The two of the were eager to attack and since there was no one to be seen ahead or behind I let them get in front of me. I mean, there was six laps to go still, so I just trailed them and I knew they weren’t riding a ot of the course that well, waited for them to make mistakes and attack then, when I knew I could gap them good. My chances came when Rickey got wrapped up in the tape in the slow and soft “S” turn, and then one more time when Jeff clipped a barrier and went down. I got around no problem and then all the voices in my head were ATTACk!!!! So I did, and held the two of them off to take third for the day. The race was well done and the course was killer. Lost of fast turning without hitting the brakes. The file tread Challenge tubulars loved the course. On the way home Nathalie and I hit up an orchard stand and picked up a huge jug of cider and a big bag of Empire apples. The past few nights I’ve been making baked apples. It makes our house seem all seasonal and warm.

Photo form Democats.com