I was driving back to Cape Cod to stay with my parents and do some fishing and ironed out details with Roberto-san to stop in western MA and kick off my season. I maintained my focus of riding pretty easy in September to get rested up to ramp up the intensity (having done none of it with the exception of the Dirt Crits) once CX season starts here in October. Then it's 10 weeks all out. Regardless, I was feeling pretty pretty fit and jazzed about the whole experience. I had just glued up some new FMB's and naturally feeling PAF as I registered for the Cat 4/5 race.
We got there a day early and after 2 days driving I was pretty happy to have some time to preride and stretch the legs. The course was great with two big power sections through the field, two wooded singletrack sections and a 45* camber section with multple 90* turns that skirted the brewery walls.
Lap one of warm ups I went into a turn and heard something weird which I thought was my tire slipping on the rock hard ground. The same thing happened on the next lap and I realized my front tire had rolled. I was pissed for not having brought my tubeless setup but just swapped out the front wheel and went on with warmups. After an hour of so or riding the rear felt fine and I thought one FMB was more pro than none at all so decided to rock it.
There were about 75 people in the race and I got a good start and put in the effort to get into the first wooded section in the top 5. By the next wooded section I had moved up into 2cd and was feeling good. I clipped a pedal on the one of the off camber turns and got kinda trapped on my bike and slipped back 10 or so spots. Once again I moved up and was back in the top 4.
I think it was about 25 minutes in going though the off camber sections again when I heard the velcro like noise of the day before. This time almost the whole rear tire peeled off the rim. Game over.
In all my years of riding (for one season TRAINING on tubies) I had never rolled a tire. One remarkably different experience I'm having with this string of bad luck/crashing compared to the old me is how I respond to it, which is refreshing. I didn't chuck my bike into the woods or dwell on it. I was happy with how I was doing and to iron out some issues before my fitness is better and I care a little more about how I think I should be doing.
Roberto-san had a bad start but, true to form, worked his way back up and had a respectable race.
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