Utah State Champs

This Saturday, Bergy, Byers and I suffered through the 5:30am wakeup call and headed down to Odgen, UT for the Utah state cyclocross championships. Even though we aren't Utah residents, we still wanted to make the effort and toss some Victor-Cross passion into their state championship races. States races are usually well-attended, so the added competition certainly motivated us to get there, regardless of the long drive. The 8-hour total drive time gave us plenty of time to chat about top-five albums of all time, hard-tail vs. full suspension bikes for racing and to rationalize why we think we deserve iPhones. Bergy and Byers are great, highly-entertaining company, so I'll usually take any excuse to hang out with them, racing or no racing.

Bergy, putting the hurt on the Utah boys.

The course was fun, but certainly favored roadie-types. There was no climbing, nothing too technical and the headwinds and course features made it all about power, power, power. The race was held at a fairgounds, so parts of the course actually had us jumping over cross-county horse jumps. Good stuff.


The race went well for me, especially considering that I was still fighting the remnants of a chest cold. Thankfully, I felt good enough to ride well. I didn't cough up any sections of lung and came way with the win. I rode with a gal for the first lap and a half, but quickly rode off the front and stayed there the entire race. Besides a front flat in my warm-up, a flat on my cool down and a loss of 25psi in my rear tire during the race, all went well. (I'm not a Utah resident, so the state championship does not apply to me.)

Sadly, this was my last cross race of the season. I am certifiably addicted to cross, but know that I need to cut the racing off, get some rest, catch up on some grad schoolwork and rest up for the upcoming mountain biking season. Heck, March (and my first mountain bike race) will be here before I know it.