Ashland Baycross Part II

BayCross #2: Sunday 19th – unlike Saturday’s sunny beautiful weather this was a bit cooler and overcast. I’d not gotten in on any of the pre-rides or course work so I was riding it for the first time about 20 minutes before the race as I was warming up. Initially I had my doubts when I was told of where BayCX #2 was being held, at Bay View Park in Ashland, but that was quickly erased upon riding the mile plus course. It was one of the most perfect courses I’d ever seen, great use of small rollers for good cornering and momentum. Excellent variety, use of terrain/conditions including a beach crossing, a rock bed profile and a good sized run up.
Added to the mix was Shawn’s comment the previous day about some “better” cross competition coming down from the Twin Ports. Which I certainly welcome anytime. The more & better the racers -- the better the challenge. So I was definitely pumped up at those prospects and looking to put down some pain, as I was just having one of those strange masochistic-like-feeling days. The desire to go out and drill it from the start for one sole purpose of making myself and others hurt.
Lining up at the start among others was apparently a sponsored Specialized rider which was going to hopefully make things interesting. Scott “superman” Chapin was there on his Gary Fisher SuperFly with 1.75’s and rigid fork and most of the crew from yesterday. What I’ve learned is never try to gauge your competition from the bike they ride. It might just surprise you. The start had Specialized guy pull to the front only to nearly hit the deck rounding the first corner 50-75 yards out as we rounded a pair of crab apple trees. It’s October in northern Wisconsin… you can’t tell me you expect the apples to still be on the trees? Must have been like marbles under the wheels of roller skates. Nonetheless he got right up as the jamming up continued behind – then it was off to the next series of corners, straightaways, bridge crossing and then a quick dive down to the beach. Specialized lead to this point with Scott Chapin in tow followed by me. I knew I wasn’t going to be backing off today. When we ramped up over the rise that lead to the beach, Scottie & I pushed hard through the 50 yards of beach and Specialized got off and ran. We hit the 40 foot(?) run up close to the same time. As I recall Scott got to the top first but I clipped in sooner and jumped to the lead giving it my all as we crossed the 150 yard section of loose rock. This was a power zapper for sure but like any good course a great challenge where you could inflict damage on the competition. Apparently it worked cuz when I got to the end only Scott was remotely close by, within a short bit I eased up alittle and asked him to take over and continue to put the distance on the Specialized rider. By the time we reached the S-curves and rollers 3/4ths the way through the course we’d had maybe 15 seconds on him. I took one corner too sharp and slip down to the ground momentarily, it was enough for Scottie to get a gap and run with it. I thought oh, no not this again! I’d be chasing his tail around by myself for the next 55 minutes, great!! Scottie is an awesome endurance athlete, outside of some asthma and allegories he’s certainly the best all around endurance athlete I know. If I remember correctly he was 17th in the US Olympic marathon trials a few Olympics back, if that gives any perspective to the physical capacities he has. He may be a genetic freak, but I hope he stays around racing for a long time because somehow one of these days I’m going to finally catch him.
My next goal was to maintain and grow the distance on the Specialized rider, cuz you don’t generally come decked out in full bike sponsored gear without a resume for being half ways decent and the back side of the course lent itself very well to the cross bike he had. Sometime in racing it’s about breaking someone’s spirit, if you can do that enough times repeatedly, you’ve got them frustrated and if they’re frustrated it certainly doesn’t hurt your chances. So if I could maintain the distance or even grow it on the SuperFly (don’t rule this machine out as a very suitable cross bike!) he might start getting bummed and realize he didn’t come to just any cakewalk race.
Going into Lap 2 the distance I had was a good 50 yards so I’d been able to pretty much maintained the lead over the back half of the course, but in front Scottie had gotten a good 20 yards in front of me now and he was looking even stronger than yesterday.

The layout of the course was great from a spectator point of view as they essentially sat at a higher vantage point, were in middle of the course and could see a large distance both ways. So you’d get lots of cheering and encouragement. Knowing my bike handling skills I could probably gain time on the third place person and with any luck make small advances towards Scottie at the beginning of each new lap. And lap after lap, it seemed like the same thing was happening, the gap was growing in two directions, I was putting distance into third place but Scottie was putting time into me. I was content with the position for awhile until Kelly McKnight, who got lapped earlier due to breaking his pedal off and was now riding behind Scott Chapin and yelling back to me how it was too bad I was in third place now. His smartass remark got me to kick it up a notch to finally catch him when he had to drop off Chapin’s pace. I worked with Kelly for while his back & body held up before he decided to drop off.

Getting a bigger lead on Specialized guy with each lap gave me confidence going into the final three laps so I let up somewhat, and the fact is I wasn’t shrinking the distance to Chapin (but at least I would yell at him most times about how I was going to catch up when the trail would double back, if he heard me I think he just chuckled). I saved up alittle those final laps just in case I’d need it for a late surge from behind and I wanted to experiment with how much I could back off and how it drop my heart rate, as I had my PowerTap heartrate monitor on. From what I could tell, backing off didn’t do much to change the heartrate. Normally I’m 177 to 178 beats per minute at race pace but dropping to 175 and 176 in a long race.

This day, I wasn’t getting fatigued or symptoms of cramping like yesterday and it felt so good to be riding that well relative to the rest of the field. Shawn Gort road a decent race but either he didn’t have the effort of the previous day or I was doing that much better. He told me earlier he wasn’t giving me any freebie’s today, fortunately I didn’t need them and he wasn’t handing any out. I believe he was 5th on the day.

Coming through on the bell lap, even if I wasn’t going to catch Scott, I was pretty pleased on the day. I had the distance now to hold onto second barring any mechanical malfunctions and it felt pretty good to have been able to put together such a strong race, feel strong throughout and put away a sponsored rider. I thought perhaps we’d demoralized him early but my wife, Kate said he looked just as determined as ever with each lap. He’s probably a real good rider normally, just having a tough day. We’ve all been there. He commented later on the rock section.… Well, we’re all entitled to an opinion -- I guess I could have complained about the smooth blacktop sections or having a shoulder/push a MTB over a lightweight CX bike. But in the end Scottie was the best and nothing on the course would have changed that outcome Sunday.

What was great about the race course was because it was so open you could see how other parts of the race were unfolding among other riders. Scott Nesvold had a good race nailing down 4th place, Kelly would have probably done significantly better without snapping off his pedal with his monsterous downstoke. Matt Hudson and Mike Weispfenning seemed to have good rides as well. We seem to have in the last few years gotten a great group of racers over here not to mention some super quality people. The biking outlook in the area would appear to be very positive for years to come.

Perhaps, the Baycross’s are the last races of the year for me but with how good I felt and having strong results it going to be hard to fight the temptation of tracking down another CX race or breaking down and finding an Ebay entry ticket to the Iceman Cometh in lower Michigan.