The unfortunate part of cyclo-cross season is that it starts at the beginning of the fall semester, and ramps up in line with all of my school work. As the term grinds on, I find it hard to keep myself motivated to keep riding and I rarely have enough free time to maintain a blog. I have enough writing to do as it is, and writing for fun just isn't in the cards.
The end of October was the busiest time for me. We had a foster kids in the house for a brief bit and I had the Savannah Cyclocross Superprestige to organize. We spent so much time getting ready to host our race, that riding to train for the actual racing was a luxury at best. I begged to be pulled out of the Pro/1/2 race on Saturday night, unable to even maintain enough momentum to have fun in the process. The frustration and stress of putting together an event wore me down, and even a beer hand-up wasn't going to lift my spirits. Despite feeling like I was barely moving, I didn't get caught by the leaders until they were on their last lap. So, a relatively normal day on the course.
The next day was better despite barely sleeping Saturday night. I decided that I clearly wasn't fit enough to do the P/1/2 race on Sunday and sat it out in favor of only racing single speed. It was a tough call since I was hoping to still finish top ten in the overall series, but getting beat that badly every week isn't as fun as you'd think. I managed to actually race that afternoon in the single speed race and didn't feel like I was just riding around in circles. I pulled in a fourth place after thirty minutes of playing in the dirt, and then set about tearing the course down.
As the season trudged along, I kept getting similar results. I fought for lead lap finishes and pretty much always managed to stay just outside of the top ten. In my last post, I mentioned how I felt I had a little bit more direction and hoped to still have a go at some UCI races. ProCX races kept coming and going and I realized, especially given my performance in the local series, that traveling to race the big guns likely wasn't the best use of my resources this year. After my hometown race, it took some work to recover and focus on the next few weekends of racing. I discussed things with my coach and made a plan to try to regain some fitness going into the end of the season. The week immediately following my race was tough but I lined up for both the single speed and P/1/2 races in order to try to get some extra time in on my bike, and work on my technical skills after losing our local trails to the hurricane.
Despite my inability to perform, I was still generally enjoying the races. The new course at Atlanta Motor Speedway was great fun, and I edged my travel partner/pseudo teammate out in the sprint. It made for some solid banter, but completely drained me for my second race of the day. It was all about extra training anyway.
I chalked November up as a rebuild period and set my sites on December. There were three big weekends of racing all back-to-back after the Thanksgiving break, and I wanted to build up as much momentum as possible.
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