Stony XC

"The real battle for anybody during adversity is to pay attention to the things that you can control, focus on the things you want to do, and to hell with the rest of it."

- Lloyd Carr

The race at Stony yesterday went reasonably well for me. The weather was just about perfect. It stayed in the mid/low 70's and was a little overcast for the whole race, so I stayed nice and cool. The rain the night before also left the trail in good shape, it was just wet enough that the trail was tacky but not muddy.

From a fitness point of view, the race was just OK. I could tell that I hadn't raced for two months. The race went like mine usually do, I got gapped early on, but people started coming back to me late on the second lap.

The surprising thing about yesterday was that I was reasonably quick through the singletrack. Were people still pulling away from me here? Yes, but not like they did in the Marathon race. I'm definitely getting closer to where I need to be. One of the things I've really been working on is to try to stay relaxed, particularly with my upper body, and this really seems to be helping.

Just one race story to share. On the last lap, I caught and passed an RBS guy on the two-track just before the Pines. He really looked done for when I went by. After the last section of singletrack, I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had come back a little. I decided, whether he was in my class or not, that I wasn't going to let him go by me. So I put in a really hard effort for the last ~2 miles to try to drop him. About 40 yards from the finish, you had to take a long left hand turn on a paved road. I made it to the road, figured I'd dropped him, and backed off just a touch (without looking back). That's when I heard the whir of knobbies on pavement just to my right and saw that he was still there and trying to go around me! I punched it and outsprinted him to the finish. I talked to him for minute after the race, and found out that we were, in fact, in the same class.

After the race, the next priorities were sleeping and eating, to recover for the hockey game that night. I felt reasonably good by the time I left for the game, and, in fact, the game went pretty well. I think a big part of it was that most of the other guys were not in such good shape, since this was our first skate of the year, so my fatigue wasn't so obvious.

I'm really dragging today though. Today is an off day. I'm thinking I may go for a short recovery ride tonight, just to get the blood pumping and loosen up a bit, but we'll see how I feel.