This Sunday started off great! I got an awesome night of sleep,woke up and caught some of the highlights to some of Saturday's football games. After a solid few hours of relaxing in the morning, I got ready to ride to the course at JR Ranch. I'm a huge fan of all of the Hudson cross races, especially since none of them are more than a five minute ride from my house! When I arrived at the course,I rode a few laps on the course. I was really feeling the rhythm the course had and I knew that the race was going to be pretty hard the entire time. After pre-riding the course, I picked up an awesome cup of coffee from Oliver at the Bikery van. It was seriously one of the best cups of coffee I've had in a long time! I'm sure the waffles are amazing too!! I just relaxed at the course for a few more hours until I started to get ready to race. I was feeling really good in my warm up, but I knew the heat would be a huge factor so I was drinking as much fluids as I could to try to stay hydrated. After I finished warming up, I went down to the start. The field was looking strong with the previous day's winner CJ Faulkner, both Dan and Doug Swanson, Josh Roeser, and roadie Brandon Krawczyk. I messed up the start pretty bad because after warming up I forgot to redo my rear brake cable so it ended up getting caught in my wheel immediately. After redoing my brake and checking to make sure that everything was still good,I started to chase back to the front. The rear brake was pretty loose because I had stretched the cable when it was in my wheel, so just to be safe I switched bikes in the pit. I chased a little too hard, but by the end of the second lap I had caught CJ and Josh at the front. When I caught them, I had a lot of momentum coming into a long uphill section. I attacked pretty hard and got a gap on CJ and Josh was just a little ways behind. I spent the next lap riding a pretty high tempo, but CJ was still easily able to catch me with his amazing technical skills. He was putting a ton of pressure on me through a lot of the technical sections, so whenever I could get in front through any turns, I would. We kept going back and forth,with 6 laps to go I had recovered from chasing. I attacked all out on the same uphill section as before and got a good enough gap that I felt I might be able hold. I made sure to make as few mistakes as possible until the end of the race. I was able to hold CJ off for the rest of the race. Both Josh and CJ made me push myself much harder than if they wouldn't have been there. Thanks Dag and Paul for putting on such a great race!
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