Last year this was one of the fastest courses of the season. I was looking forward to some of the same this year. Despite the rain, I was thinking that the course would be fairly dry for racing. Not so. It turned out that most of the course was muddy. The infield and the pit area had some really sticky mud. I saw quite a few people that had forks and stays the were completely jammed up with mud after their races. Watching the cat 4's run much of the infield, it was apparent that this was going to be interesting.
I didn't even bother pre-riding the course, I figured things would sort themselves out pretty quickly. Sure enough, before we were even half way through the first lap Steve Tilford went right to the front and had a huge gap out of the mud pit. By the end of the first lap, I was in 2nd with Luke Linnenger in tow and we had a gap to Jeff Winkler, Travis Donn and the rest of the chase group. Steve was gone, it looked like he was not having any issues with mud accumulation.
I pitted on the second lap, rode back to the grass and my derailleur sucked up into my cassette and blew to bits. I ran a few steps, then realized how far I still was from the pits. At that point, I decided it would be better to save my legs for Sunday.
I've been quite lucky as far as DNF's have gone, this was my first in 3 years of racing cross in the midwest. I'm guessing it has to do with how little mud we see for most of the season out here.
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