My First PRO experience

Fruita TT – My current training program has me swapping volume for intensity these last few weeks. Unfortunately the last few weeks have been the type of weather that would make a professional port-a-jon cleaner puke.  So basically I do the intensity but don’t get any of the maintenance miles. I then had a rest week scheduled for the week before Fruita, but I wasn’t really tired. So I was just de-training myself. In short I sucked at the TT. I mean I was slower than last year.  Last year I was so slow I was afraid they were going to charge me extra to race. They had a valid point, I mean they did have to wait around until it got dark for me to come in, and they do get paid by the hour. On the numbers front I rode the first 10 minutes of the TT 30 watts below my race simulation, that’s pretty bad. Shortly after the TT I began to ponder all the things I could have bought instead of a bicycle here is one of them.

 

Man I would be a bad ass at the Cherry Creek shooting range with this thing, 600 rounds a minute of pleasure at that rate you could have burned through almost a 1000 rounds of ammo between my time and the winners time.

In anticipation of the XC I went shopping for one of those slow moving vehicle triangles. I couldn’t find any Amish wagons to steal one off of so I broke down and got one at Wal-Mart.

I also picked up some of these trinkets to outfit my rig for the back of the pack. 

So on to the XC the next day. I really had no anticipation of riding well today, however I did feel better than the day before. After a warmup, which did no good because the race was delayed 30 minutes the start was on.  My first PRO start wasn’t as violent as I anticipated. I was able to stay in the group fairly easily for 10 minutes, even move up. We did one little hill where I had to work pretty hard, then I was hit with another roller that separated me.  I had to slow down and this is where  I imagine my race was over.  I wasn’t concerned about losing the heads of state, just the working class pros that I should be competitive with. The course had a long two track/road descent that my bike really liked. I’ll take a YETI over just about any bike if its straight and downhill.  I caught up to Chad Cheeney. You always know it’s him. I don’t know the guy but he has the worst B.O. of any human. I have been smelling his skank since my early Expert days. The Mesa climb wasn’t too bad, I got in a lot of traffic some other PRO’s were hitting the wall on this thing. I decided to go to the granny just to keep moving around the mine field. The photog was at the top and caught me in all my glory. Perfect sock height documented again.

 

The Climb

I got passed once on the mesa by a 29er guy, who promptly forgot how to ride his bike after he got in front of me, I had to baby sit him down the whole descent. At one point we were going slow enough that I could have grabbed a sandwich and a beer out of the cooler, on a 4-wheeler that was half-wheeling me.

The highlight of the race was the climb out of the river bottom. I usually suck at this point in the race, but I think I found my legs.  I made contact with the next group of guys, but ran out of hill before I could do any real damage to them.

Summing up it wasn’t bad for the first Pro race, I really only needed 4 minutes to get where I wanted to be. If I could have hung with the main group a tad longer I would have gained that time easily. Give me a long hill and who knows. I did get a comped entry to Chalk Creek, so I guess I have to do it. The only problem is my stitching came out of my high quality shorts.  When I took of my pants at the lot my chammy pad literally fell out like a wet tongue. I'm down to one usable pair of team kit, I may be running stealth next week.