Blunt Park

Again, we have some belated blogging. The day after D2R2 Ed and I did a 'cross race in Blunt Park in Springfield. It seemed like a good idea when we pre-reged and less so after we finished up D2R2 with cooked legs on Saturday. But we raced and both felt much better and had more fun than we expected.

Sadly this the best picture I got of Ed because I didn't know about the "sports mode" setting on our camera.



Before the race, I saw Laura Shuford, who remains one of the very nicest people I've met through bike racing. It seems to me like just yesterday that she was pulling me around during the circuit race at Green Mountain after we both got dropped (she because of a mechanical, me because I was out of shape). But it was not yesterday; in fact she now has three kids. The oldest is 5 and the youngest is 1. Wow. It was wonderful to see her again and meet her gorgeous children.

After that I had the luck to be near Meg when Eric Marro offered to do a lap of the course and show us the good lines, hazards, etc. This was super helpful and made me feel more confident about the twistiness and frequent dismounts. In fact the course was kind of like a clinic for 'cross skills.

I lined up next to a woman with a figure-eight shoulder brace on. She told me that she had a broken collarbone and that if she crashed again, she would have to have surgery. So my mission was to get as far away from her as possible so that I would not in any way be responsible if she crashed. I rode as hard as I could and was pleased that the mounts/dismounts went okay, though I had trouble steering my bike through all the twists and turns. But I was pretty happy with how it went.





Here's a picture of Ed taken as we were packing up. I love it when he wears this shirt.