SCC #2 - Evergreen HS

The second race in the Seattle Cyclocross series took place yesterday at Evergreen HS in White Center under beautiful sunny skies! I stayed true to form and managed to f*** up my pre-race plan. Instead of arriving at 7:30 to get a warmup and course pre-ride, I overslept and got there shortly before 9. One of the benefits of getting to the race so late is that no one else is that dumb, so registration was really fast!

I had just enough time to do one quick lap on the course, but it really wasn't enough. My lack of warmup killed me and even though I started up front, I was quickly in the back of large 35-40 person Women's Cat 4 field in about 300 meters. Suck. Our race started in heavy fog, which was pretty cool, but made me chuck my glasses at the end of the first lap. I couldn't see anything after half a lap.

The course was really fun, with lots of tight, off-camber corners, a fairly steep runup, one set of barriers, and one short technical descent. I managed to stay upright the whole race and out of trouble despite a few crashes around me. One girl went down particularly hard in the twisty part of the course. It didn't look too good but I heard later that she was ok, so that was good news.

As usual, my 1st lap was the worst. Once I got cruising though I finally started moving up and picking some people off. The descent seemed to be difficult for most of the riders around me, but I picked a really bizarre line off to the side, laid off the brakes, and had no trouble. Granted, I was going too fast to negotiate the corner at the bottom, so every time I would hop off and run up and around it, but I still seemed to get a gap on the people behind me so it couldn't have been that bad of an idea.

We completed four laps, which made our race seem really long. I swear it was closer to 40 mins than 30, but after only finishing two last time I was happy to do more this time. I finished 26th out of 36, which is much better than I did at Snohomish, so I'm happy I'm moving up. Elise had a great race and snagged 13th. Way to go Elise!

I still need to get much tighter on my cornering. Every time I'd pull away from the riders behind me I'd have them right back on my tail after the twisty sections. I also need to start warming up so I can maintain a better position on the first lap, which is key. No oversleeping for Kelly Creek next week! My back is tired of being black and blue from getting stabbed by the pedals, so looks like I need to perfect my shouldering technique as well.

Overall though, I'm having tons of fun and I'm somewhat surprised that the technical parts of the courses are where I start to pull away from other people. I've never considered myself a strong technical rider, so that's a bit of a pleasant surprise. Good times!

Some of the highlights of the day included Chris Hill getting 2nd in the Men's 3 field and doing a groovy skidding stop at the finish line. Adrian Hegyvary also entertained the crowd with his post-finish superman-style amazing display of balance. Give those guys some props!