Bubba Cross at Mt. Pleasant Winery

It was with much anticipation that I looked to this past weekend's race at the Mt. Pleasant winery in beautiful Augusta Missouri. Images of Nationals at Napa floated around my head for the past several weeks and when tales of the course working through the bar emerged, my excitement peaked. At last, we would have a world class event where drunken revelers could shower us with Norton as we wove though tangled vineyards battling it out for the prestige of a win in a historic Germanic community.

Well, the race had most of that but it also had the most punishingly brutal course ever tread upon with knobby 32's. The sadistic bastards who laid out the torture fest made full use of the steep country hillside between the winery and the Missouri River and all of the life sucking mushy ground that it contained. Up and down and up and up and a little down and a BIG up before we wove around on the top to take us through the bar and onto a pavement stretch that offered the only semblance of "recovery" on the whole God forsaken track. I started well, better than usual, and slotted into tenth-ish. The ground was sucking the life out of me and I knew that I needed to stay steady to avoid the potential for physical explosion. I yo yo'ed with the usual suspects that I yo yo with weekly and ended up 15th. This was my lowest placing so far, but I was satisfied to have finished the hardest CX race I've ever done and to have maintained some consistency throughout. I also had a personal victory from riding the run up all but two laps and having the raging crowd that lined it inform me that "not even Breslin did that". That was enjoyable, but one thing he did do was ride away from me so it doesn't really matter. Still, I'll take what I can get. This season has been consistent if unspectacular for me but I still have three weeks left and I hope to inch a little bit higher this coming weekend and hopefully put in a good ride at state in two weeks. It's winding down, but I'm finally hungry.