OrrvilleCross #3

This Sunday was cooler, but it was perfect Cross weather. I made it down to OrrvilleCross for the 3rd race of the series. The course was short and fast. Ray has an excellent description of it on his blog.

I managed to get good starting position in the front row on the far left. I had commented to a Stark Velo rider, J. Leaman I think, that I was surprised he wasn't in the big ring for the start (we had about 50-75 yards of pavement). At the start, he took of HARD and got the hole-shot with me right on his wheel. Tony Marut just managed to stay upright in the start, but really came close to losing it for some reason.

I kept a steep pace for about the first 1/4 - 1/3 of the lap, where I let Tony around me into 2nd place. I held 3rd for a bit, but I soon let some more riders around in the long pavement parking lot section.

I was really starting to hurt early into the 2nd lap. I don't think I'd gotten a good enough warm up in. As I was falling back slightly, I looked back and saw Julie and Pat Miranda starting to gain on me.

At this point, I noticed that I was gaining on the Stark Velo rider who had fallen off of the 2 Orrville riders in front of us. I made a move to get up onto his wheel, at which point he sped up and we worked our way up to the Orrville riders. From here it was a shuffle of positions for the next lap or two.

After a while one of the Orrville riders fell off and it was just the 3 of us. We had kept and increased a large gap on the riders behind us. Through the barriers with 3 laps to go, I got a good deal ahead of the other two. This was good, since there was a strong headwind at this point, but I wasn't thinking I could maintain and increase my gap at this point. The SV rider looked like he had caught up to me as we came to the corner to turn out of the head wind. I was going to say something to him about working away from the Orrville guy, but he must have done too much work to get up to me because he fell off hard as I picked it up.

When I saw that I'd started to get a gap, I hit it harder. Starting the 2nd to last lap, I had a substantial gap. I worked to increase/hold it on the 2nd to last lap, but was more concerned about not making any errors or loosing time.

The bell lap came and there was really no one close in front or behind me. More consistent riding had me finishing out in 4th place overall. The course was 1.4 miles and I maintained a solid 13 - 13.5mph pace turning laps at +/- 6:10min per lap.

Results:

http://orrvillecycling.com/OrrvilleCross.php#results