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fairfax
2006/10/28
a men
dfl

white hill had a fun, small race feel after 3 consecutive weeks of bigger, series races.

after two mellow warmup laps on the tight course, my legs seemed to switch on, and i had some pretty great sensations for a half lap before the ladies came around after their start. a few warm up sprints a bit later out on sir francis drake didn't feel quit as spectacular, but not bad either. good signs for things to come.

only about 15 racers and no singlespeeders in arrears made for a pretty sane start, which was a nice change after last week. it would have been tough to accomodate a big field here with the tight start stretch and course in general. the school grounds were pretty small and they didn't have a lot of real estate to work with. so lots of tight, low speed corners that some folks were struggling with that kept speeds down. definitely a course that rewarded technical grace over brute speed and fitness. this suited me just fine and i actually found myself riding midpack with nick, jay, and evan after a couple laps. guys i haven't been able to touch most races so far. seemed like everyone i rode with crashed in the first 3 laps but i was having no problems.

and with things going so well, on the 3rd or 4th time down the fast bumpy decent after the runup on the back side of the course, PSSSSSHHHHhhhh...! poop! the air was completely gone from my rear tire in about 5 seconds, and i was about as far as i could get from my spare wheels. so i had a nice 5 minute jog around the back half of the course to the pits. a distance i probably would have ridden in about 2 minutes. everyone went by, although i was happily suprised how long it seemed to take for the tail to catch back up to me. i'd really put some time into them.

with at least 3 minutes lost to the next rider and another race tommorrow, i figured there wasn't much use digging too deep to try to catch back up with anyone, so i settled into a nice tempo pace for the second half of the race and got some good technical practice.

not much hope for the tire it seems. it has a 1/4" slash in it that looks too big to try to get to close up with sealant, so it's a write off i think. not suprising given how fast the air evacuated from it. i guess i'm on the clinchers tomorrow. hopefully i can get a new tire glued on this week.

thanks to tom and bjarne who hussled to find me a spare wheel when they saw me running. i got to my own spare before i got back around to them with their's. but i appreciate the effort. it was motivation to not dnf.

and thanks to dave for riding from sf to fairfax even though he only caught the very unspectacular ending.

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