We started the weekend out with a light 2 hour road ride on Saturday - beautiful sun, little wind and a relatively flat ride to look after my knee. Sunday was a XC race at local race site, Bucca. Known for its fun single track with little climbing, I was looking forward to the race.
Evan and I did the 1 hour ride out to the race to get some extra kms in the legs. The plan was to race the 6 laps like I used to - none of this endurance stuff....just go hard from the start and hurt all the way.
Half the course was very wet and boggy - lots of bog holes and wet tree roots. 2nd lap into the race I slipped one of these tree roots and came down on my bad knee...AGAIN !!! I got back on and finished my lap slower than I started, but I had the fear in me by that stage. 3rd lap had me fall off in the same spot. Finishing this lap off I thought about the race as a whole - do I continue, with the risk of coming down on my knee again (high risk by the way I was riding by now), or do I take the cautious approach and consider that this isn't the race to go all out. So I piked it and cheered on the other A graders who were going all out.
Evan finished 2nd behind Geoff Gilchrist - and what a race Geoff had...brilliantly consistent, never stumbled, and trashed Evan to the point where I was doing turns up front on the hour ride home.
I'm looking forward to the night race in a couple of weeks time. Let's hope I've got my head (and knee) sorted by then.
No comments:
Post a Comment