Well, another season of cyclocross is over, my third to be precise. I decided to stick with the category 4 because honestly I haven’t put in the effort to move up.
A good friend recently commented that they found that hard to believe, especially given all of the riding I have done this year. All I can say is that it takes effort to get from one level to the next.
Yeah you can ride a lot, but if you aren’t really pushing yourself you aren’t going to improve. It’s the same reason why you can be rather overweight and yet still do the STP. Walking vs sprinting. Same situation if you’re working out, going to school, trying to lose weight, whatever.
It’s all about pushing the comfort zones appropriately. I remember back when I was lifting more seriously that one of the guys working at the gym said that getting to 10% body fat was a real effort.
True that.
So anyway, I was able to finish off the season with the final race down at Kelley Creek this past Sunday. The weather was cooperative but it had done some damage the few days before. It was muddy and just overall a hard ride. It was the first time that I was seriously thinking of calling it quits. By the last lap it was feeling like I was barely keeping the bike up in some sections.
The joy of the smoker’s cough if you know what I mean.
I ended the season 38th overall out of 130 all racers.
That sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Perhaps I’ll just leave it at that.
It’s true. I did finish 38th overall with 6 of 7 races (total scores are taking your highest 7 of all 9 races). I missed 3, but really only 1 given that 2 are dropped. This means I could’ve gotten perhaps up to 30th overall.
Of those 130 people, really only about 60 raced more than 4 races.
To really get serious you have to start talking about training zones, lactate threshold, anaerobic threshold, intervals, tempo riding, and all that jazz. So who knows. We’ll see.