Cyclocross & 2010

So the season has come to an end. I figure I'll go over some of the highlights this year for me as a brief overview.

For those of you who read this, all 3 of you, and you are wondering what cyclocross is. Its a bike race that consists of riding a modified road bike offroad in the dirt/grass/mud. There are obstacles and hill climbs that one must run over/up/down in order to complete the circuit. Each race is timed and will only last a 30 minutes to an hour. The courses range from 1-2 miles or so and are usually pretty fast in nature.

So this year's GA cyclocross series started out in Macon GA. I was totally amped cause I had a new bike I was very familiar with riding and had just gotten. It was a 2005 LeMond Poprad. I love this bike. It's my first real road bike. It's a Reynolds 853 steel frame with 105/ultegra components and some beater wheels. I got it in April of this year off of Ebay. So since I had the bike I figured I might as well race in C's. So I did. It was my 2nd C race, and I did pretty good. I felt good on the bike and it handled like a champ around corners. Its very very easy to tell when you are going to loose grip and its very forgiving in its corrections. So this was the start. It was a fun race. I did SS and C's. I tried to keep this up most of the season. I ended up doing 3 SS races and 6 C races in 6 races overall. One of the races didn't have a SS cat and the C's was where I raced my SS.

Noteable races certainly include Psychocross. I dressed up as Elliot from ET with a doll and basket. We whipped around the velodrome and turned the whole thing into a giant mud pit. It was awesomely painful and fun.

I really enjoyed Augusta's race. That course had just about everything. The run up was good, the hills were good, the flats were awesome. I hope they can keep hosting it there it was a really really good race.

Dahlonega wins the worst race of the season. Jim and I both agreed that this was a punishing course. It felt like 80% climb for 20% of really not fun or fast downhill. The climbs were so rocky/techy/bumpy and there was this ridgeline climb where if you slipped off a line about 8" wide you would slide down a giant hill with very little chance of recovery. It was also very very cold to start the day, but warmed up a lot. The course was on a hillside so half of it was in the shade and the other half in the sun. This made for a terrible chilling/heating race. I totally overdressed, but then felt underdressed. It was horrible. This race knocked Jim out of the series. He did not race until the final.

The final was this weekend at Conyers. We helped setup the course and a few people on our team along with Sorella put most of it together. Big shout out to Kari Linder and Eric Nicoletti for all their hard work. You guys rock. It was a fun race, but I was not feeling the love. After taking a 2 week cyclocross break I lost a lot of my edge and speed. I hadn't done any road rides at all or much mountain biking. I just wasn't up to snuff. So I accepted my bottom 10 finish and had a lot of beers to make up for it. Beer+long climbs=good times.

Dallas race is one of my favorite courses. I know most people aren't crazy about it, but something about the creek crossing and the mud and the STAIRS makes it all totally feel like a cross race. My parents, girlfriend, sister, brother-in-law, and aunt all showed up to cheer me on. It was amazing having them there. It was very strange having my dad yell at me to keep me motivated on the sidelines. It felt like I was at a soccer game when I was a kid and he'd cheer me on, cause he'd always be the one to take me (thanks for that dad). It was a really good race. I did C's and SS and fell apart in the SS, but still managed a finish despite the unrelenting climbs that just soaked up all my energy, but the downhills there let you get some SERIOUS speed and it all balances out. It was a fun day. My sister took me out to lunch too. Kickass. A great family outing watching a member wreck themselves on a steel wheeled instrument of torture for an hour and change. :-)

I didn't get into the series this much this year. The slow guys on our team didn't take as much of an interest as last year. A few guys tried it out and ended up being super fast and moved up in the ranks. A few new people tried it out and liked it. The thing I like about it is the format allows for more crowd interaction than XC racing. In XC you see the start, then its 7 miles through the woods and you see the start again. In cross its every 100 yards someone is cheering you on or at least looking at you and it really motivates you to push a bit harder. Today that did not seem to work for me, but that's how it goes sometimes.

I really need to work on my layout of these blog entries. Will I race next year? Probably yes. I can't seem to shake the hope that one day I'll focus on my training and get faster and do better. I mean I trained for FM24 and I saw results. I saw 2-4 minutes come off my fastest lap times. That's results in less than a month of training, but riding 3-5 nights a week in 12 mile intervals as fast as you can seriously burns you out. I was so done with bikes after that race I took almost a month off, and that was a mistake cause I was not ready for cross and it was too cold to really get any good training in (with my schedule...).

So 2010 my cycling goals shall include but not be limited to:
Complete 34 mile SGTT (just finish, without bonking or hating myself to no end)
Race a few GSC/SERC events
Race 1 6 hour race (team or solo)
1 Dirty Duathalon
1 5k
1 10k
1 half marathon?? (doubtful, but we'll see)
Race GA-CX series

Hopefully focusing on running also with give me a bit of an edge in the department of cross training. I miss running kind of. I used to be halfway decent at it years ago so I know I have it in me. Its just hard to get motivated to start something. We'll see if I can make it happen.