Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks since the TransRockies adventure. I made it home to Bend just in time to pick up the slack of the move from Chardonnay Lane to Portland Avenue (so stoked to not have to spell “c h a r d o n n a y” anymore…) Josh and Lizzy did a champion’s job of getting the ball rolling, all I had to do was finish up and get the boys from Hutche’s bike shop moved into the old place. Which took a week in between training and catching up on some other stuff around town. Training mostly, which, thanks to some guidance by Bart Bown, seemed to be going well, SRM power info was good and my body handled some testing and solid workload really well. Plus, some high country singletrack shredding in there for good measure…
Ahead of time I acknowledged that I’d be a bit tuckered out from adult life at home so arranged to head back to Dad’s place in Maine a week before the Windham World Cup race. I reckoned I’d better be rested up for the hallowed Coupe du Monde’s return to American Soil, and east coast soil at that. More training, resting and shredding at Mount Waldo sorted me out for the weekend, or so I thought.
The Windham World Cup Group had done a great job ordering perfect weather to accentuate the improvements they’d made to the village and race tracks and the weekend was looking to be a huge success. Unless you were me, one minute after the gun went off. I just didn’t have it. The fatigue of training the last two weeks was still deep in my legs and they just didn’t want to co-operate. Because co-operation is such a key component of any World Cup start, with everyone working in unison to get things sorted out and racing underway. Oh wait, that’s an orchestra, this is anything but… Things sorted out pretty good, with me getting sorted backwards through the 40’s up the first climb. The beauty of being buried in the cheap seats is you have better opportunity to not see something the guy in front of you didn’t see. This gives more options to smash into something and get a flat tire. Which I did promptly at the top of the descent, just as I was about to make my move… A bonus of first lap mechanicals is that by the time you’ve fixed it (in this case by riding my new 2011 XTR wheel on a flat tire all the way down to the start line pit where Joe installed a fresh one) most people have passed you. Normally this would be kind of entertaining for me, as passing is fun, but today I just didn’t have the energy to deal with it. Fortunately, I found a goal on the second lap, other than catching as many guys as possible while not digging too horribly deep and taking the fatigue into the Worlds next weekend. That goal was to, no matter how low on the climb Wolfram Kurschat passed me, I would re-pass him by the bottom of the descent in a peculiar inverse contest. He goes up hill real fast, not so much down. By the last lap it took me until my favorite corner on the course, a grassy, loamy long left preceding the last short woods section, to make contact and subsequently achieve my goal. I used the last 20 seconds of descent to open a 15 second gap, which he nearly closed in the 20 second climb to the finish. Talk about two ways to skin a cat…
I finished 10 minutes down on the winner, Jaroslav Kulhavy (first timer!) in 43rd position. It’s been a while since I’ve sucked that bad in North America against all the world cuppers. Hopefully it’ll be a while before it happens again.
Harvey volunteered to drive home to Maine after the race, so after Felice gave my legs a recovery massage and fed us some homemade Lasagna we struck it north. Good thing we did, otherwise we’d have missed neighbor Dave (remember the guy with the deer to dress?) swinging by on his way to Sebec Lake on Sunday. We hopped in the boat for an afternoon of R and R on the water. Just like in 5th grade…
Hopefully that’ll be the first step in a one week plan to assimilate all the hard work I’ve put in throughout the summer with this whole comeback process and I’ll end up killing it this weekend at hometown Worlds!
Ahead of time I acknowledged that I’d be a bit tuckered out from adult life at home so arranged to head back to Dad’s place in Maine a week before the Windham World Cup race. I reckoned I’d better be rested up for the hallowed Coupe du Monde’s return to American Soil, and east coast soil at that. More training, resting and shredding at Mount Waldo sorted me out for the weekend, or so I thought.
The Windham World Cup Group had done a great job ordering perfect weather to accentuate the improvements they’d made to the village and race tracks and the weekend was looking to be a huge success. Unless you were me, one minute after the gun went off. I just didn’t have it. The fatigue of training the last two weeks was still deep in my legs and they just didn’t want to co-operate. Because co-operation is such a key component of any World Cup start, with everyone working in unison to get things sorted out and racing underway. Oh wait, that’s an orchestra, this is anything but… Things sorted out pretty good, with me getting sorted backwards through the 40’s up the first climb. The beauty of being buried in the cheap seats is you have better opportunity to not see something the guy in front of you didn’t see. This gives more options to smash into something and get a flat tire. Which I did promptly at the top of the descent, just as I was about to make my move… A bonus of first lap mechanicals is that by the time you’ve fixed it (in this case by riding my new 2011 XTR wheel on a flat tire all the way down to the start line pit where Joe installed a fresh one) most people have passed you. Normally this would be kind of entertaining for me, as passing is fun, but today I just didn’t have the energy to deal with it. Fortunately, I found a goal on the second lap, other than catching as many guys as possible while not digging too horribly deep and taking the fatigue into the Worlds next weekend. That goal was to, no matter how low on the climb Wolfram Kurschat passed me, I would re-pass him by the bottom of the descent in a peculiar inverse contest. He goes up hill real fast, not so much down. By the last lap it took me until my favorite corner on the course, a grassy, loamy long left preceding the last short woods section, to make contact and subsequently achieve my goal. I used the last 20 seconds of descent to open a 15 second gap, which he nearly closed in the 20 second climb to the finish. Talk about two ways to skin a cat…
I finished 10 minutes down on the winner, Jaroslav Kulhavy (first timer!) in 43rd position. It’s been a while since I’ve sucked that bad in North America against all the world cuppers. Hopefully it’ll be a while before it happens again.
Harvey volunteered to drive home to Maine after the race, so after Felice gave my legs a recovery massage and fed us some homemade Lasagna we struck it north. Good thing we did, otherwise we’d have missed neighbor Dave (remember the guy with the deer to dress?) swinging by on his way to Sebec Lake on Sunday. We hopped in the boat for an afternoon of R and R on the water. Just like in 5th grade…
Hopefully that’ll be the first step in a one week plan to assimilate all the hard work I’ve put in throughout the summer with this whole comeback process and I’ll end up killing it this weekend at hometown Worlds!
