Hot Cyclocross Buns

photo courtesy of Pete Thomas

As a final tribute to the two wheeled season my cycling team (Sportsman Ski Haus Cycling) chose to host a cyclocross race to close out the Montana season.  Somehow fall came and passed and I managed to not race my wicked awesome cross bike once… in fact it still had the shop shine and rubber thingy’s on the tires it had seen so little use.  Sunday we awoke to a solid green blob on the radar showering down copious amounts of bone chilling rain, 38 degree temps, and that feeling where movies and coffee indoors sounds way more appealing than doing anything outside.  Unfortunately, that was not an option on the plate, so I threw my stuff in the toaster and headed out to Herron to finalize set up with the team and registration.  Fortunately three giant boxes full of scones from Ceres awaited and endless hot coffee brought me from a hypoglycemic, hypocaffeinic grump to a sugar buzzed, caffeine infused ginger.  Somewhere around scone number 6 I decided I might as well race even though I had awoke with zero intentions in doing so.  The previous day had been a grand slam of fun with a run up Big Mountain, a solid ride around Whitefish Lake on the Whitefish Trail, and then some serious fun partying with good buds til o:pumpkin:30.

Old man Mully figured he might as well race too, and between the two of us, it was nearly half the field on this banner day for cyclocross. Guess all the Missoulians and Brozemanites are a little too soft to venture this way to race in some real conditions 😉  With a solid 10 minute warmup of sitting in the toaster with the heat cranked trying to get my hands and toes properly warmed up before they would gradually loose blood flow and function through the race, I hit the start line and went straight to the “back” (that means like 6th wheel in this race) to allow myself some time to warm up in the race.  After a lap I realized my fitness and fatigue were actually descent tools to work with so I put the hammer down to catch Mully who had dropped the rest of the field.  I latched onto his wheel about 10 minutes in and decided to stay there despite the healthy heapings of mud his rear tire was serving up for dessert.  I wasn’t sure who was the stronger man throughout the race, so I began analyzing the best places to attack in the final lap to go for a W.  Mully has this odd habit of trying to talk about the race during the race and how it should play out while we are actually racing.  It happens between us quite frequently in fact.  We always seem to be neck and neck when we race each other, and he repeatedly tries to talk about what tactic “we” should use and when “we” want to go for the win.  Ha!  I mean, sure we are teammates and it’s good to both get to the top step and it’s good to work together… but this is a race man!  We had handedly dropped Chance and Noony and Russel the Muscle and then the racing really began in my mind.  Ok, so maybe I’m a little bit competitive, but we did decide to pin numbers on after all, instead of stay warm and cozy in synthetic insulation and gore-tex.  So coming into the final lap Mully asks me, “Do you wanna spring it out at the finish line?”  I mean, what am I supposed to say??? “Actually Mully, I’m going to attack you in 3.5 seconds and then you can respond, and then blah blah blah….”  So I mumble some sort of non-answer while I can feel him slowly turning up the heat to the pedals.  We came around a U-turn in grass that bottle-necked into a super greasy singletrack and I decided to just pin it and throw the cards on the table.  It felt great and I somehow managed to slice through the greeeze on the skinny knobbies and open up a descent gap, but within a half minute the legs reminded me that I have not making these types of requests from them lately, and they were bound to revolt.  I told them “shutup legs” taking a page out of Jens Voigt’s lifebook and kept spinning the pedals like a Vitamix that only has the ability to do very high revolutions with very little horsepower.  I stuck it to the finish, and half smirked with the win because I knew I had raced dirty, and I don’t just mean mud.  But hey, that’s racing!

photo courtesy of Pete Thomas

It was fun to get out and feel the burn and go through the tactics mentally and got me pretty excited for this upcoming winter and Skimo Racing.  Through the Ridge Academy and CAMP I have managed to secure some support and sponsorship to get out and do some racing so I figure I ought to give it another go for a year.  I guess I wasn’t quite ready to give that one up yet…

But more exciting than that is the realization that I have one more shift before I’m off to New Zealand for a couple weeks with the fam!!!

FEATURED IMAGE COURTESY OF MYKE HERMSMEYER