Turning Up the Heat...

Last week at Orchard Park in Hampton Falls I ended up with a 4th place finish in a small field at a great local venue through an apple orchard.. The 4th place finish got me a call up onto a "deep" podium that included the top 5 finishers. I think they did this because the 5th place finisher was from Nor'east Cycling Club and they were the sponsor of the event. So they added two spots to the podium to recognize the Nor'east rider. Whatever, I took my spot on the hay wagon, raised my hands with the strong guys in the top 3, and walked away with the $30 in cash and two Hammer Energy gels for prizes. Two energy gels!! As Rick Flair would say, "Wooo!". 

I'm the short one...

The race was a very strong effort for me. After a very sucky start where I ended up behind the entire 35+ field as well as most of the 45+ and 55+ fields which started with us, I proceeded to pick people off one at a time and some in groups until I was all alone.. There were only three guys left ahead of me with too big a gap for me to even contemplate reeling any of them in..

Like a gazelle over the barriers

 Kurt Perham (my coach) who won by a very wide margin, followed by Mike Rowell and Aaron Millet.. All three of these guys are among the strongest Masters racers in New England. A couple quick notes from the day... One of the other racers in my field came up to me after the race to let me know that he was trying like hell to stay with me. In other words, he was marking me. 

I was also being marked by freaks, look closely in the background

This was interesting to me for two reasons. First, there's lots of better guys to be marking. Second, I thought I was the one that spends his time marking other people, now I was among the people being marked.. So I guess that's kind of cool.. The other interesting thing that happened to me was a mishap with the embrocation prior to the race. Embrocation is a muscle warming balm you rub on your legs prior to cross races.. A lot of guys do it, a lot don't. If you ask me, when you're out racing in short pants when the temps are in the 40's and below, anything you can do to keep the legs warm is a good idea. So I applied the embrocation earlier in the day prior to putting my kit on.. Then I thought to myself, "Shit, I should have put my kit on first because if any of this stuff ends up on my soft parts I'm screwed".. I carefully put my bike kit on, but apparently not carefully enough.. "Chestnuts roasting by an open fire" played in my head as I spent the next two hours writhing around with a case of fire ants having a field day in my crotch. It was awful. After 5 minutes I knew it was going to be trouble. As the heat grew and grew I kept saying to myself "well it can't get any worse than this...", as it continued to get worse and worse for about 30-45 minutes.. Luckily, by the time the race started the heat had been turned down to a simmer and was surprisingly cozy. All I can say is thankfully I was using Mad Alchemy's Medium Heat Embrocation and not the "Madness" that I will use when the temps are in the 20's.. Pretty sure if I make the same mistake with the "Madness" I may die (or wish I had)..

Off to Northampton for Week 5 of the Verge Series on Nov 7 and 8 where my only chance of getting on the podium is to jump up on it when nobody else is looking :) Gotta love the small local races, but to be fair, I am definitely improving and getting stronger pretty much every time out. It was nice to finally have a top 5 finish...

Best,

kevin