WORS #3 Battle of Camrock

For this race compared to the last race the travel time was greatly diminished from 4 hours to 25 minutes. Finally WORS had arrived at my home course! I slept in late, had a big breakfast and jumped in the car. I got dressed on the way and jumped right on the bike as soon as we parked and started warming up. I could see the storm clouds rolling in as I warmed up on the road and about 15 minutes before the start it began pouring. Unfortunately it turned a lot of the trails to mush, but luckily the rain stopped right before the start. The first few waves went and I got my call up, Don did the count down and we took off, I pulled the hole shot and was first up the big start hill. My friend Andy and another guy passed me on the first flat and I tried to stick with them. We immediately started to catch lap traffic and we slowed down to a stand still. Most of the first lap was like that and I stayed within eye sight of Andy. It was quite a struggle to not be able to go full speed on the trails that I know like the back of my hand. I had to be very aggressive with my passing which led to a few slide outs in corners. Towards the end of the first lap my right shifter gave out and I could only use 2/3 of my gears. This made it pretty hard to climb the monster climb at the start. The second (and final) lap continued to not go well as another racer crashed me into a spectator on a straight away, luckily he sort of caught me and I continued on my way. The rest of the lap was a struggle with minimal gears, the muddy trails, and the numerous crashes really worked against me and I was feeling very discouraged but I finished strong and ended up 2nd in my age group and 5th out of 210+ starters. It was not the race I was hoping to have on my home course but it was still pretty fun!