Beacon Cross 2010

This race was a last minute plan, hatched over a beer at the Wednesday night Halloween Fifth St Cross race (night of the G.O.A.T). Although I had missed pre-registration by barely an hour, I figured it was worth a shot to drive up with Greg and Chris and jump in the "C" race Saturday morning. The downside is no call-ups, but Beacon sounded like fun, and it's always worth going to a cross race.

The morning was cold, and I pre-rode the course in my fleece just to try to warm up. I tried to stage myself up towards the front, hoping that they might just do call ups for top 20 or something, and let me scrum in behind them, but no dice. They called up the numbers from 400 all the way back to to at least 480, and me with number 493 got to scrum in at the very back. There were a few guys behind me, but not many.

Fortunately the start was on a long, paved, slightly up hill straight and I managed to slip by a good number of people before the course narrowed into the woods. After that, it was a matter of finding openings and squeezing through any cracks I could find.

On the first time up the amphitheater, I totally screwed it up. There is a descent down the hill, then a sweeping left hand 180 degree left turn to the run back up the amphitheater section. Despite doing it well during the warm-up laps, I unclipped with my left foot and had to come to a complete stop at the bottom step, un-clip my other foot, clumsily climb off my bike, and then start the run up. Lost several spots doing that. Check out this dope:



About a lap and a half in, Chris tells me from the side that I'm up to 7th, coming into the "Amphitheater of Pain", I manage to make another pass on the run up, and the announcer is playing up the battle for the top 5 podium spots. He was doing a good job, much better then some of the race announcers you hear at these amateur races. The run sections were very good for me, the sand pit almost the maximum 90 meters long, (Greg said 89 meters) and I was able to consistently make up a spot or two there. On the final lap I got into 4th place and I could just barely catch Greg's yellow jersey through the woods, but coming up to the finish, he was still a ways ahead of me.



Our finishing order worked out great, Greg held on to his aggressive start for 3rd, good for more MAC series points. With me slotting in at 4th, that will help him against his closest rivals in the MAC series. He finished ahead of Alvarez and Lavelle, and my 4th bumps them down one more spot then they would have been if I hadn't raced.

Now I've got 9 points and 9 cross races, and it takes either 10 races or 10 points to upgrade to Cat 3. So either way, my next race should put me over the top.



The course was really fast, and had some good flow. The loose sand in the turns made picking a good line very important, but over all I liked it much more then I expected. It always seemed like there were plenty of places to pass, and I could move up pretty easily despite the high speeds.

Check out Festa's report on his win in the B race here.