Glocester Grind

photo blatantly stolen from Craig Mello


I just got home from the race and nobody is home, so I figured I get right to it and post up a race report.
I don't usually do the EFTA races, but this one was close and I wanted to "tune-up" for Winsted Woods.
I'll serve this up bullet point style.

• Beautiful weather.
• Nearly zero elevation gain.
• Pre-riding it seemed as if everything would be rideable. The course was fairly technical with muddy rock gardens, but nothing crazy. I think the lack of elevation took the crazy down a notch.
• During the actual race everything was not rideable. I'd say only 50% of the rock gardens were cleaned. Stupid mtb'er pride bite me in the ass by trying to ride everything, making it 3/4th through and getting hung up on a rock and having to run. Yeah, I was that guy.
• Too much running.
• How the fook did RI get so muddy, when 50 miles away in W. Hartford it's bone dry? Actually most of the course was dry, but the rock gardens turned into a quagmire of ankle deep sludge in less than a lap.
• I don't like them starting the Sport riders at the same time as us. I'm sure it didn't effect the standings, but having to pass lapped Sport riders is a little annoying. Their skill level can lead to them freaking out and forgetting their left from their right. I can see how it makes sense logistically for the promoter, but I need to bitch about something. Sorry for being an elitist douche.
  
• Too much running.
• I was following Brian McGinnis, giving him crap about his bike creaking and him owning a bike shop, so he promptly showed me what a technical maestro he is and dropped me. Serves me right.
  
• On the ride home I started to have cravings for pizza, pumpkin pie and chili. I'm going to go find some when I'm done with this.
• Rick James is awesome; how can you not love a song with a bridge that goes "do me, do me, do me, dooo meee, do me, do me!
• There was too much running in that race.
  

Now for the results. I got 7th in the expert 42-49. I would have like to finish a little better than that, but oh well. 1st through 3rd were all sub 1:30, with Chris Borrello winning with 1:28:04. John Mosher got 4th with 1:31:18 , followed a minute back by Brian McGinnis of JRA Cycles, who was just ahead of Geoff McIntosh at 1:32:53, and then me at 1:33:06 (and then everyone else). So we were bunch pretty tight (4-7 that is).
I though my time would have given me the win in the Singlespeed Open class when I was looking at the raw data, but Carl Kresser absolutely smoked the field with a time of 1:28:20, beating 2nd place by over 7 minutes. Wow.
I was pretty happy with loosing less than 2 minutes to John Mosher, but then he told me he's been sick. But he's thinking about racing his singlespeed, so that would be really cool.

Now was this an effective "tune up"? Will my results improve now that we are getting to some races with some elevation change? Will I get some chili and pumpkin pie?
I guess you'll have to stay tuned to find out...