Saturday, December 01, 2007

Lemme tell ya

Hebe ‘Cross has come and gone just like that. As usual I have mixed emotions. After not racing for a month I was expecting the customary shock to the system. We raced 5 laps and I didn’t feel good until 2 to go. My legs came in just around the time Tom McDaniel caught me and some other dude. I was stoked to have McD with me because he’s a big dude with loads of horsepower to shelter and tow me on the flats. Shame is the other dude stacked the barriers and ate shit right in front of me with 1.5 to go. What disappointed me was I wasn’t riding in his line. I was ready to attack him over the barriers on the left but when he lost his footing he clogged the entire left side. I T-boned him good twisting my stem/bars in the process. By the time I straightened my sled and got going again McD was 10 seconds up the road. See-ya. To make matters even testier, I never totally straightened my stem so for the final lap and a half my bars were a tad to the right. I was happy to hold off Moats. He’s been right on my tail at a few races this season but hasn’t quite caught me yet. In the end I finished 15th. Good MAC points. Without the incident I probably would have lost a sprint with McD for 13th. Although 12th was only a couple seconds ahead of him so who knows how it would have worked out if we could have worked together somehow.

What bugs me is when dumb stuff like that happens beyond my control. If I had screwed up on my own would have been easier to swallow. The course was an absolute blast. Very fast and in true Hebe form it was super flowy. You could pedal through just about everything. Fun times. Brewer won the sprint for the win. Good for him. He’s a nice guy and real friendly. On the plus side from my view is although I finished 15th, I was only 2 minutes behind the winning group. For such a fast race I can take satisfaction in that. At Wissy I was 1:40 back and that was all the way back in October when my level of fitness was a tad better. Mike had a nice finish in his race, 4th.

I wanted to stay for the Elite races but due to the impending crap weather for Sunday The Wifey and I decided to get our tree today which didn’t give us much time to work with. Last year when we snagged our tree TLW was still about a month away. This year we got to take her along and let her be part of the choosing process. I think she picked out a nice tree for her first Xmas. Now that it’s officially December I will no longer allow myself to be grumpy about all the holiday talk/music/ads/bullcrappery. With Thanksgiving being a little early this year, quite frankly, November 24th is just silly to be seeing A Christmas Story on TV. And yet, there it was. Silly.

Look at those teeth!

Haley choose her tree

The Wifey agrees

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