Careening Towards Trees at High Speed

Today was my first cyclocross race of the season! I had a blast. The race was at Hellyer Park, the same place as the track races I blogged about a few weeks ago. For those of you who don't know, cyclocross is kind of a mix between a road criterium, a mountain bike race, and some cross-country running. The races are short, today we raced for 45 minutes, and very brutal, today my average heart rate was 190. Sorry for the number geekness but that's kinda high and last time I told my mom about an average heart rate that high she was like "sweetie! you could have had a heart attack!" But anyway, for some reason cyclocross is fun and addictive. I used to be pretty horrible at it, due to my former tendency to look at fast-approaching barriers, rocks, and sand pits with alarm, and rather than steering or pedalling or whatever I would just sit there and think "wow... that looks like it could hurt" but I am learning how to avoid them now! Last week's mountain biking helped. Anyway, on to the photos:

I actually got a pretty good start, which was nice because it was a decent-sized field. For cyclocross I am on the Freewheel Bike Shop team but I don't have Freewheel shorts so once again I am sporting the lovely, slimming yellow McGuire shorts... gotta do something about that before the next race:


Successful avoidance of a fast-approaching tree! And what made it even more fun is I was in second place at this point:


Successfully not tripping over barriers!


Here I am running up hill the lazy way, i.e. pushing not carrying the bike, but my bike is fairly heavy so I am NOT shouldering that thing cyclo-cross style until I shed some weight from it somehow, btw donations of nice light parts are welcome but sadly not tax-deductible:


Here I am right before the finish, in front of the other two girls but actually in 3rd place in the race after a few dropped chains, but the mishaps and mouths full of dirt are part of what makes cyclocross what it is (meaning: very fun in retrospect, but for about 44 of the 45 minutes I am out there it's more like "ok, this is fun right, i swear this is fun, oh look there is someone i know with a camera i better smile! ok ow, ow ow ow, bleh, ow, i said this was fun right?")


I have some post-race photos but I look dirty and red-faced and very thirsty, and you should know by now that I am not a fan of posting unattractive photos of myself... so if you want to see images like that, come out to some races! Here is the race calendar, I am doing all the Bay Area Super Prestige Series races because if you do all of them you get a Perfect Attendance prize! Plus, don't forget, cyclocross is fun.