Carbon Cross Compact Crank Cracked....

or: Weekend of the Giant Crank Arms.

So while cleaning my cross bike after a muddy night of Fifth St., I noticed that my pedal was loose, but it was tight... The threaded metal insert was coming lose from the carbon crank arms.

Crap.

Thankfully, an email to the team got a quick response from Roland offering me his compact road crank for the rest of the cross season. I took him up on his generous offer, and could now finish the rest of my races.

My brother Peter was up from Michigan that weekend, on his way out to Nepal. I asked him to guess how big the cranks were: "170mm? 175mm? 177.5? I have no idea..." 180mm. They felt strange just pedaling around, but as soon as I started racing, I didn't notice any difference at all.

I had two races that weekend, Phelps School on Saturday, and Kutztown Cross on Sunday.





On Saturday, I got a nice front row call up for the B (3/4) race. My start was good and I was sitting about 5-7 coming down the first fast descent. Around the bottom turn, the guy in front of me slid out and sent me in to the tape at the bottom of the hill. In 2 seconds I went from top 10 to dead last. I accelerated as quickly as I could, and hammered it hard for the next two, passing as much as I could. I worked my way back up to 6th place, but those two laps put me a little too far into the red. It didn't help that my cleats were popping out of my pedals, once on the steep ride-up, once just on a bumpy section of grass, and once for no good reason. I was a little too tired, and started to make mistakes, coming around with 2 to go, I slid out on a turn and got passed by the guy on my wheel. I lost contact with him and then got passed once more to finish in 8th.





Overall, a fun course, I liked the hill in there. Check out Chris's race report from Phelps.

Sunday was another dry, fast day. This whole season has missed out on the mud from last year. The B field was small, and I enjoyed another front row call up. Jeff went out hard from the gun and I followed him around the first few turns. I slid back another few positions and ended up trading spots a few times with a Cutter's rider. It took me a few laps to figure out a good rhythm and find good lines through some of the really tight twisty sections. I never did work out a good way around the trees and went down over those roots at least twice.









I ended up coming through in 5th, overall a good weekend of racing, and it looked like it would be the final wrap up of the cross season for me. Goals for next year include not falling down quite so much.

Chris also had a

But, there was to be one more race....