Boulder Rez Beach Party

It was back to the Boulder Reservoir for another addition of CX. This is one of my favorite courses as it requires a lot of power to get around in the sand, and of course it doesn't hurt that I got the big W the last time I raced here. A couple of crashes and a broken shifter had last place the closet thing I came to winning today, but am happy to report that I was NOT DFL.

Blue Sky nation was in full force again today. We've grown to two ez-up tents now and have people racing in almost every race.

I took a very different approach to the race today and started out a little slower. This left me surfing the back end of the pack, but I remained patient. I then begun to play some tactics that started moving me forward in the race. I would sit in and recover on the road and then jump my group and bridge the gap to the next group. Then sit-in and recover and then go again. I was feeling good physically and moving forward was helping my mental state.

The normally long sand run up was made even longer today. Ouch!

On lap two I had just finished the run up and was heading for the sand and back to the shoreline when BAM my front wheel stuck and over the bars I went. It was a soft landing, but it threw me off my game. I got back up, pick up my bike, and had to run down to the shoreline before I could get back on the bike. I told myself to stay focused and started tracking down the group who passed me when I crashed.

Working the barriers before the next mishap

A couple of laps later I went down hard in an sketchy off camber corner. After getting up and seeing that I wasn't bleeding too bad, I noticed my shifter was bent. I got back on the bike, but the shifter wasn't working and it turned into a single speed race for me. Even though I ended up with a very poor result, I was happy with how my race started and I felt better than I have to date.