Fast and annoying (Race Report: Cross Crusade #3, PIR Heron Lakes)

I worked insanely hard for 81st place. My hips are wrenched from all the dis/remounts. I could barely walk yesterday afternoon, let alone carry the kids.

The Fast: this course was intended to be muddy. The lovely weather yesterday turned the surface tacky. Which meant high speeds in every maneuver. What wasn’t a dead sprint was jumping a barrier. I’m pretty well built for this kind of racing (at my category, anyway) but I prefer crashing and chaos: I prefer mud. This was almost a road race with barriers. The upside: lots of space to attack the huge field ahead of me.

The Annoying: 200 riders. Two hundred. Cross Crusade uses a semi-random callup method whereby groups are called up by the last digit of their race number. Thom and I, both Zeros, were called up in the third-to-last batch. So we started somewhere around 150th place. That makes me feel better about my 81st place, I picked off seventy ducks! But still. The leaders were easily minutes ahead. Dog knows I don’t race for points but when the field’s that large, staging is destiny.

For this I skipped Ninkrossi?

This is a huge race in a tiny venue, squeezed into a narrow space between a the international speedway and a golf course.The party vibe was there (finally: post-ride beer!) but I wasn’t much having it. Jenny and the kids had fun. They (and Chris) cheered from from exactly the right spot. In Kiddie Kross, Orion rode his Green Zebra pedal bike almost unassisted (except for an off-camber descent — on the kiddie race, are you serious?).