Plymouth South

Well, I have been waiting to post up a report on Plymouth because I have no idea how I finished yet. Due to a yard full of leaves and two lovely little girls that were dying to jump in a pile of them, I had to get home right after I raced. So I did my thing in the 4's (race time was 10 otherwise I would have done the B masters), then watched Gary, Rich, and Jim start, then I took off. As of Tuesday morning, still no results posted. That bothers me....anyway....

The course was great...a mix of everything--some great woodsy single track (GREAT for me), coupled with long and open straight-aways (good for the guys at Psycho that keep f-ing beating me). Despite a lingering chest cold, I felt Ok and got off the line in decent enough shape. My biggest goal for next season though is improving my starts. As with many races this year, the bottlenecks at certain obstacles on lap 1 have a definitive mark on the outcome. I tend to be a decent enough bike handler but if/when I am caught behind guys that struggle on slippery stuff, I lack the power to bridge to the leaders once things open up again. It's my feeling that if I can develop more power and get off the line more quickly and then (theoretically anyway...) be able to stay there for two laps, I can dramatically improve my placings. This race was no different with guys stacking up on the off-camber turns right off the pavement. IMO this was an easy obstacle, even with a couple across going through it, but there were crashes and I was behind them. I caught up to Dave on the second lap and was hoping we could work together a bit to bridge...but my brain shuts off when I go into O2 debt and I just keep going as hard as I can. Need to work more intelligently with team mates from now on, it's doable in cross I am convinced.

Course notes of interest:
-I loved the waterbar descent through the woods-the traction was ideal and I was full gas through this section each time through. On the last lap, a 3/4 woman stacked pretty violently right before the uphill out of the woods....she seemed ok but that looked nasty. The guy from NEBC that was with me in this section literally rode OVER her!!!
-The off-camber S-turn section right off the road was also very cool and Sterling-esque. I wonder how much quicker I could be on that with tubulars at low pressure?
-It's too bad they took that steep downhill by the backstop out of the course, that would have been a BLAST to bomb down.
-The long grassy straightaways by the ball fields again crushed me. It's frustrating to watch somone literally ride away from you when you are giving every ounce of power you've got and the gap is still growing.

In any event, I think I placed top 20 or so, but we'll have to see how it goes.

Next up is the BRC race in Lowell, one of my absolute favorite courses of the year.