Today we made the trip to St. James to race one of my favorite courses. Forest City Trail is a gem. There are so many kick-ass aspects to it, from rock gardens to drop-offs and pine sections. Eli opted to do the Juniors race, which I kind of figured was below his potential but he's still not convinced that he's capable of doing the category classes. He won his class, and his time suggests that he should have been in the Category 2 race, which is not only filled with great riders but it's a longer race by a factor of two. I think he will do that from now on. Proud of him!!
I also may have raced in the wrong race. I've been racing mountain bikes since the Spring of 1988, overwhelmingly in the XC Expert/Cat 1 category. Lately we've done a couple of races with different formats, like the St. Joe Last Miner and Wolf Creek in Poplar Bluff. I had a blast at both. So I decided to do the Marathon race at Forest City instead of Cat 1. It was the biggest class of the day, with 24 people. I felt things were going really well for the first 10 miles or so, but then not so much. The photo above is a pic of my Strava file, which showed that my body thought it was extremely hard. (I have only scored higher one time, in the off-road half-marathon that I ran in 2018.) I started cramping very early, which is odd since I felt like I was going at a moderate pace. It went downhill from there. The object of the Marathon class is to do as many laps as possible in 3 hours. I pulled the plug at the end of my 3rd lap, having gone just a few minutes under 3 hours. I think I got 6th or 7th place? I'll chalk it up to a bad day. I've had so much hip pain over the last couple weeks that I'm getting very little sleep, which can make for a bad race day, but your guess is as good as mine.
The beautiful Mrs. K was nowhere to be found this weekend. At least not around here. She went to a NICA thing in Steelville for the weekend. Don't worry about me, though. I still had plenty of company.
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