Monday, November 12, 2012

FSC #7--Lakeland, Florida (11/11/12) & Other Stuff


Ok...before I get to last weekend's racing, I have to back up a little bit and catch up on things that went on a couple of weeks before.

First, I went to Clermont with my family to compete in the Florida State Road Race Championships on Saturday morning. It was an exciting race. On the first lap, 3 kids in my group got into a wreck and one of their wheels came off and almost hit me.  I got lucky and managed to avoid that mess. I ended up winning the race, sprinting to a finish with the top 3 guys in the 13-14 year old class.

After that, we drove down to Sunrise to race the Coconut Cup Short Track race at Markham Park in the afternoon. Markham is a really cool course. Because there aren't a lot of mountains in South Florida, many of the drops, climbs and other features are man-made and Markham has some really cool ones. For the ST race though, we mostly just rode the parade lap and kids course.


Sunday morning, I lined up for the cross-country race. I got a good start off the line and except for one pass that Troy made coming around the second turn, I stayed in front. Then, I slipped on some loose gravel coming out of the single-track and went down hard. Several riders got around me and I had to spend the rest of the race catching up. The one really bad thing about Markham is the really narrow, technical single-track that makes it very hard to pass people. Lap traffic was working against me. In the end, I managed to catch up to Sam  and we sprinted to the finish. I got him just before we turned into the finish line "chute" to take second. Troy finished about 5 seconds in front of me for the win.


And now for the most recent race....Lakeland. Dad made a cool video of this race, so take a look.