WV Night Club Cross

Thoughout the entire week I was looking forward to yet another cross race. The adrenaline high of cross racing is so great that the entire week kinda of suck. Monday suck the most and its almost down right depression from the lack of endophines flowing though your blood. Although the week the weather report were forecasting snow.  Being that skiing is my number one sport off course I was uber excited. Saturday finally came and at my house disappointment....no snow.

On the drive down though from Uniontown to just south of Morgantown it was snowing hard in areas heck some areas had snow on the ground! me and my road trip mate Jason were now really stoked to get a sloppy, cold wet snow cross race. Sometime just prior to Lost Creek, Wv though the snow stopped and sun came out. At the venue the race wasnt even muddy! ca va.....

Whatever! cross racing is fun no matter what, but oday would just be pain with maybe alittle bit of fun. Preriding the course I found that I was extremely over geared and that today's course was extremely bumpy. Never has  a otherwise benign grass field been such a bad ass mutherfer as today. That course kicked my ass. Hell I endo in a ditch on my preride! The grass was like riding on velcro, there was as many hairpin turns as Gunnar is old(which is alot), and it was bumpy as a ski mogul run. Did I mention there was singletrack section that led to a ditch that was pretty hard to bunny hop on a single speed speed? Then there was an slick off cambered run up to quick remount steep DH.

Start of the race after some hard effort warms up though I felt good and was thinking I would be better than most.  My call up was nice for a good start

I didnt totally suck at the start and ended up maybe 7th wheel. A hard effort though the first lap put me in second not to far from the Pflugger. My belief in cross racing is to go hard at the start no matter what. trying to ride though traffic is a waste of energy.  I kept a strong effort in a attempt to try to chase down Pflug unsurprisingly it didnt work. It did however solidify the gap I had on the field with the exception of local nightcluber Morgan Miller. Morgan was riding a lower geared SS mtb and I have to say that wouldnt have been a bad choice for today.

So an epic 3 lap battle ensued. Every time I would get a gap I either have to slow down to breath, get caught up in lapped traffic which 3 laps in is when we started to lap people, or I would have to dismount and run that stupid ditch when the MTB was able to bunny hop it. In the end morgan seized a moment on the run up with traffic and got me on that run up. smart move and after 3 laps of trying to out run him I was so beat my pace and motivation dropped way off. After a couple hundred yards of recovery, I went hard again to ensure Marc Glass wasnt going to catch me. The reality was me and morgan put in such a strong effort that noone was really that close at all in the SS class.

So a hard fought battle and a 3rd place

hopefully some pictures of the actually racing soon.