Sac River

Ended up in the emergency room after racing in Springfield, Mo this weekend. We headed south in a downpour to get some racing intensity in even though it has been a week of long hard intervals to try and prepare for 20 minute high altitude climbs.

It all started when I did some crashing on the preride with Shad. I seemed to have landed on a thorn bush and a thorn went deep in my hand. After some self/Katie doctoring before the race it was obvious the thorn was too deep to get out so I put on some gloves and raced. The race started out pretty well, Chris Ploch took the lead with Cam on his wheel. I settled in behind them with Shad Schriener following. I couldnt really use my palm to ride, but that only mattered on any downhill sections. We were cruising through the woods sort of like a fun group ride and dropped the rest of the field. The trail was good and it was nice and tacky which made it plenty fast. After cruising through the woods we came to the top of a climb, turned to head back down, and my pedal fell off. I stopped, got it unhooked from my shoe, put it back on and started up again. Since the group wasnt pushing too hard I figured I could just bridge back up to them with a little increase in pace. At the end of the lap I finally saw them and realized the gap was larger than I thought. I started going a little harder thinking i could bridge up by the end of the lap without killing myself. Pedal came off again. At the end of lap two the 3 leaders were pretty far up there so I decided catching them was probably out of the picture. Halfway through the last lap I pass Cam who is fixing a flat, he doesnt look like he has been there too long, so I get inspired to pick back up the pace. At the finish Shad had dropped Ploch, who had raced in STL the day before and I was about 30 secs further behind. It was a good end to a week of long intervals and now its a few days of recovery before heading to Sol Vista later this week.

You never know what to expect at a MWFT race. Sometimes there are good sized fields with plenty of fast guys and the next time there are 2 expert men at the start. This was a good event, the promoter seemed like a good guy and gave away 3 redline monocogs in a free raffle.

After the race, my hand was pretty swolen and the pain was building. It was decided a trip to the ER would be best, so I could get the healing started before Nationals next weekend. After the Doctor dug around in my hand for the thorn we finally headed back to Lawrence about 8:00 pm and now my whole hand is sore, mostly from the digging in it with tweezers.