sterling valley meadow

sterling valley meadow

All the recent time in planes and cars in so many different states has definitely caught up with me. Overall I feel pretty tired and sluggish and a little uninspired on my bike. Those three days of road riding in Maine did not help my case at all.

This week was the last Wednesday Worlds race at Catamount and my turn to race. I lined up feeling pretty good with two warm up laps under my belt.  But, once we took off I knew it wasn’t going to be a good night for me. My start was atrocious, very quickly I lost all the other riders except for a couple of young boys, who thankfully I passed on the first climb.

They alter the course at the end of the season so that it’s shorter and mostly through the fields, on account of the shorter days. But while the original course was fine for singlespeeds, the shortened version is not so great. There are a couple of short steep climbs, and a lot of gently sloping downhill. The sort of downhill where one can do great things with a handful of gears, but on a singlespeed you spin out uselessly and end up coasting rather slowly.

So, it was a frustrating 50 minutes or so on the bike, getting passed by people who shouldn’t be passing me. Getting passed on the downhill bits, only to have to pass them again on an incline, only to get passed again as soon as it goes downhill. Annoying. My goal was to beat George’s time from the week before, but I failed by a few minutes. In the end, I apparently got 2nd place. Though that doesn’t really make sense to me as I’m pretty sure there were no other 3-lappers behind me.

The photo above was from my ride the next day. Beautiful ride, beautiful day - though at 60 degrees was a little cold for my tastes. I headed up into Sterling Valley, did some hill work on Billings Road, enjoyed Godstreet and Tamarack and just tried to have a little fun on the trail.