Saturday I drove out to Wisconsin Dells and raced skinny tires for the first time in a long time. It's not often we have a good road race in Wisconsin so I wanted to do it almost for that fact alone, that I'm trying to get in shape and the thought of racing twice in one weekend seemed like it might be a good way to do that. It was a tough course with one long climb and two crosswind sections that guys were getting shot off the back until it was just a group of 10 or 11 of us. Last time up the climb I was feeling good and pushing the pace, but I stood up and my whole inner thigh cramped pretty bad and I had to sit down and pull out. Dewey attacked and got a gap with two other riders, I managed to work the cramp out but they were gone and I wasn't able to chase a group rotating so I rolled it in for 8th. It was pretty fun to be out racing at 30mph on the skinny tires on a course that was actually challenging.
The new 75 pound Top Fuel - Wasted!
Sunday it was back to playing in the dirt. What started out as a great new race at Lake Geneva with some good hard climbs and tons of twisting singletrack quickly became an ice rink when it started raining after the first lap. No joke, when hardpacked black dirt gets rained on the top 1/4" turns to grease and with lots of off camber climbs it was almost impossible to ride. Everyone started flailing around like we'd never ridden bikes before, I have bruises on just about everything today from hitting the deck multiple times and from thrashing around when the bike disappeared from underneath. Two wheeled uncontrolled slides were scary. The last two laps were mostly just riding/sliding the downhills, then trying to ride the uphills but realizing there was no way possible, trying and dismount but both wheels would go out from under you along with at least one of your feet, and then trying to claw your way up the hill using trees and roots for traction. Somewhere in there Lalonde got a good gap on me so I decided to let about 10 lbs of pressure out of my tires which seemed to make a significant difference. I then chased down Lalonde I ended up getting away from him and his SS on the 4th lap when he went sideways into the woods totally out of control. Suffered through the last lap and came home for the first Win of 2007. By the time we were loading up bikes the sun was back out.
Saturday I drove out to Wisconsin Dells and raced skinny tires for the first time in a long time. It's not often we have a good road race in Wisconsin so I wanted to do it almost for that fact alone, that I'm trying to get in shape and the thought of racing twice in one weekend seemed like it might be a good way to do that. It was a tough course with one long climb and two crosswind sections that guys were getting shot off the back until it was just a group of 10 or 11 of us. Last time up the climb I was feeling good and pushing the pace, but I stood up and my whole inner thigh cramped pretty bad and I had to sit down and pull out. Dewey attacked and got a gap with two other riders, I managed to work the cramp out but they were gone and I wasn't able to chase a group rotating so I rolled it in for 8th. It was pretty fun to be out racing at 30mph on the skinny tires on a course that was actually challenging.
The new 75 pound Top Fuel - Wasted!
1 comment:
Whew! a road race... Wish i could have been there... Nice work at that dirt one too...
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