States and Chagrin CX Challenge re-cap

Last weekend on Saturday and Sunday were the Ohio State CX Championship races in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus held in Coffman Park. Nice weather and a pretty decent course set-up was the theme for the weekend. There were twists, mud, sand, power sections triple barriers and on Sunday they threw in a barrier before the sand pit that was hoppable and then you could still ride the sand, pretty decent for some, not so much for others. I raced the combined Masters 1,2,3,4 race and did fair, I placed 11th overall, certainly not the placing I wanted but I was in the race the whole time. There's still some mighty fast 45+ Cat 1,2,3's out there.

Sunday I raced the open Cat. 3 race and had to race with all the young guys. Still did fairly well, but not what I would have liked to do. This year they took out the Category races with age and lumped everyone in together regardless of Category or age. So on Saturday I was racing with Cat 1's and 2s and on Sunday I was racing with the 3's but they were young....... I had no chance! LOL. That's perfectly fine though because I knew that going into this year's State race and I had used the weekend as good fast training/racing for the UCI weekend coming up next weekend.

Today was the Chagrin CX Challenge at Brett Davis'. It was a good, hard course that was different than in the past. There was more wooded singletrack and creek crossing's due to the massive amounts of rain that we've been getting. Brett did a nice job with the course re-design and the whole race atmosphere. I raced the B-1 Masters 35-45+ race and also raced on the mountain bike. I took advise from Bob Breedlove the day before when he said he was bringing the mountain bike on Sunday due to the mud sections and singletrack. I rode a couple loops before the race to set tire pressure and never really opened it up at all because the day before I did a hard 10k trail run with some hard hills so I knew the legs would either be too fatigued to do anything or they would be ready to race. The official said go and we started of pretty fast and I was feeling good. I tried to not get anerobic so I would have legs to go the entire distance instead of fading toward the end. I rode the course technically sound and never dismounted the bike once. I hopped the triple log barrier and the muddy log barrier in the woods and seemed to be hitting the right lines. I was on the gas the whole race since there were about 4 guys within 20 / 30 seconds back almost the entire race and I was closing in on 5th place overall. I ended up finishing 3rd. 45+ Master and 6th overall, so I was pretty happy with the result and even got to take home  some cash for my effort.

This weekend is the OVCX UCI  three race weekend. Friday is Kentucky, Saturday is in Middleton and Sunday is Cincinnati. Hopefully the weather will cooperate this week and dry things out a bit for some fast hard racing.

See ya in Cinci.