Discard After Reading

For reasons that should be obvious, here's a statue of a camel getting rained on.

I have been looking hard for the silver lining around the big black cloud that was my performance on Saturday at Greenbush.  The objective truth is that I finished just one lap, abandoning the race at 1 hour, 15 minutes.  The competitive racers completed that same lap in well under an hour.  I guess the upside is that 1:15 was an improvement over the 1:20 that I had posted in practice on Friday.  And I didn’t crash: body (mine) and bike (not mine) came through without damage.  I had the fitness to do better but I didn’t have the skills.  Riders with vastly more experience told me that Greenbush is among the more technical of the courses in WEMS and WORS, and that I should expect to fare better at a different race.  I do want to try another one … maybe Wausau on June 12.  That’s the Big Ring Classic, a much less technically-demanding race, especially for Citizen-class riders.  In the meantime, I still need to work on those bike-handling skills and I have to sharpen my fitness.  It’s not horrible—not by my standards, anyway—but it could be better.