Flying! Well, for me, anyway.
Fast Laps #5 was last night at John Bryan, and I’m happy to say that I acquitted myself of last week’s shoddy performance. There were still quite a few wet corners on the course, reinforcing JB’s reputation as a perpetual swamp. I was going to go out and ride Powerline as a warmup, but my buddy Kent talked me into just running through Abracadabra instead, to get a more accurate feel for the course conditions. I’m glad he did, because what I found out was that while some corners were fully muddy but had grip, some of the corners with smaller puddles were pretty greasy, and could catch you out if you went in too hard.
With that in mind, I used my warm up to practice squaring off the corners and firing out, which proved to be a successful (if more tiring) strategy. Remembering the lessons of the previous week, I paid close attention to my prep, thought about what I was going to do, and arrived at the starting line ready to go. I went out hard, knowing that momentum is the key to going fast through the opening stretch of double track, although I still don’t have quite enough juice to sprint the whole thing.
The race was happily uneventful, at least for me. I pushed where I thought I could push and held back in the corners that looked slick, and it paid off. About half of the other racers crashed at least once. Kent managed to crash three times before calling it quits, tossing his bike back into his car and leaving. But I managed to keep the rubber side down for the whole race, using the knowledge gained from my warm up and previous weeks’ training and racing to anticipate which corners could be railed and which required more finesse.
It all paid off when I crossed the line, finishing with a time of 46:54, a full two minutes faster than last week. As important, I pulled back significant time from the riders ahead of me, which means I’m clawing my way toward the podium!