Try to explain to anyone why you would pay $22 to possibly injure yourself, break expensive components, get soaking wet, eat large volumes of mud, and stain everything you brought that day and they would certainly not understand unless they also raced cyclocross. Barton park is a race of what cross dreams are made of. It was impossible to look around at the some 1200 racers and spectators and not see a huge smile underneath layers of mud on the faces of everyone.
Best photographer at Cross Crusades, I highly suggest click through the slideshow.
http://pdxcross.com/2008/11/03/barton-park-photo-slideshow/
As the Mens B and Singlespeeders were lining up, the sky opened up and began to rain even more. As this happened the approaching sounds of sirens were heard. First an ambulance and then a firetruck and various police cars. Brad Ross explained that someone just got seriously injured (later found out that it was a broken jaw) on a very very treacherous off-camber/rocky/muddy/slippery/steep downhill section. The OBRA officials decided to quickly cut out this part of the course because someone had already broke their collarbone on this same section earlier in the day. Honestly I was relieved this part was really scary to ride and I mainly just held on for dear life and tried to keep my wheels underneath me.
The lottery system was once again my foe. My number was third from the end. Oh well today was more about having fun than racing at this point. The start was a fast pavement section that lead to a sweeping gravel road. This was one of two portions of the course that were moderately safe. All of the downhills had large smooth rocks on them (very very slippery) and there was mud and standing water on every section of the course.
According to UCI (cyclocross governing body) barriers must be a maximum of 18 inches in height unless they are natural barriers. In the Cross Crusades the word "natural" means large concrete walls much much taller than 18 inches. There were two sets of these "natural" Portland barriers.
It was hard to hold any sort of line while riding through this course. It was very easy to slide off track and quickly go out of bounds (I lost track of how many times I did this). Overall I was not on my A game at all. Clearly lacking techincal skills I was going fairly slowly and then kicking on the turbo boosters on anything that was moderately safe. I did alright to hang with a group of riders for the most of the day. Overall I was having too much fun too focus on going extremely fast (loser talk) and finished 68th out of 100 riders or so.
My victory is that I didn't fall and hurt myself or wreck anything. I also finished the day with a few beers, some complimentary hot apple cider from Chris King, and a bowl of the most delicious oatmeal from Bob's Red Mill. These two sponsors are at every race feeding and hydrating everyone for free.
The highlight of the day was watching everyone clean off themselves and their bikes in the biggest "cleanest" puddle. After the Womens A race, there were many ladies soaking wet and covered in mud cleaning off. I am sure many guys were dreaming of this moment all season.
It took me 45 minutes to clean my bike and 3 repeated loads of laundry to get my jersey clean.
Here is a video shot from the day, it shows all the hilarity that ensued from the steep hills and wet slippery conditions.
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