DATE:OCT-24

LOCATION: Covington,Ga.

DRIVING DISTANCE: 30 miles round trip

Finally my first race.

I got to the park at around 9:00am, a little early but one of the guys, Bob asked me to help him out during the race, handing him water bottles. So I thought that I might have to practice handoffs. After signing in I got my bike out and rode around the course one time. I could tell it was going to be rough going for me. The weather was chilly and very damp. After my first lap there started to be a very fine mist in the air, like a light rain. I didn't mind this, I actually thought it may give me an advantage, as I was on a mountain bike and had wider tires so my traction may have been better than the skinny tires on normal cross bikes. It turned out that I didn't need to help Bob at all. One of our team sponsors "Addictive Bikes" owner, Scott was at the race for us, acting as our mechanic and basic support. He would station him self in the pits to hand out water and help with any mechanicals that we may need. This was so cool, pretty much made me feel like I was on a real team or something.

My race was the second of the day. Bob's was the first. I watched their race then got ready for mine, or as ready as I could get. My race had combined at the start, all the Juniors one of the women's Cats and the men's "C" class, which is basically the beginners. Our race was went off at 11:00am. The course itself was about 1.3 miles long, very hilly and VERY bumpy/rough. Even though it was over grass, lots of rocks, holes and whatever. It started on a section of paved road and went into an off camber left turn up to the first barrier section. This was situated on the worst hill and pretty much had to be ran up once you were over the barriers. After this it switched back and around the off camber hill to a down hill section to the next barriers at the bottom of the hill, then onto a section of paved trail through the woods. This ended in an abrupt right hand turn that went up over a washout and then a grassy climb for a hundred yards or so. After leveling off and a slight downward shift, it came out of the woods with a "S" turn and through the finish line area, past that  to a right turn where you met the last series of barriers on a slight up hill and then it started all over again. My race was supposed to have been 30 minutes long. This is supposed to be based on lap speed, I'm not sure how it's calculated, but at the end the race lasted 48 minutes by my watch. This sucked, because at the end of the race I was spent. I trained thinking the race would run a bit longer, but not by that much. In the end I believe I lost 2 or 3 places on the last lap. I finished in 9th place, the race sheet at the race said there were 11 people in my category, but the final tally on the web site only listed 10. My goals for this race were,

• To finish

• To hopefully not be last

• to finish in a top 10 spot

Luckily and by the grace of God, I managed to complete all of the goals. Now I have dropped my bike off with Scott at Addictive Cycles to do an overhaul for me. Hopefully to bring out a bit more speed. I have also started to increase my workouts, so that as the season goes on I'll get a bit faster.

This is me at the finish line