I'm logging my miles for May is Bike Month in the Sacramento Region. If you're in the greater Sacramento area you should be doing the same! If you're from a different area, then lookup your local events over at the League of American Bicyclists.

2009 Sacramento Cyclocross Race #1 Report

From Sacramento CX Race 01 - Del Paso Park

First of all I'm glad my race (Men's C) was at 9:30AM yesterday, as it was a scorcher by mid-morning. Decided not to bring the trainer and just warm up on course. The course was at Renfree Park just off I-80 & Watt Ave exit. Starting stretch was all hard packed dirt with enough room for 2 maybe 3 bikes wide. I was in the 2nd row on the starting line, should have been in 1st row. After the start it was a mad dash and a huge cloud of dust (think Northstar). Couldn't see a damn thing in front of me for about 1 minute until it got strung out a bit. There was one long straight dirt section, a decent left hand turn that you could pedal through, or drift a bit, depending on how fast you entered.. Then a long flat straight stretch of dirt heading back toward the grassy area of the park. There were a few sandy areas 1-2" deep that you could easily avoid or just plow right through. A sharpish left turn over a small wooden retaining block onto the grass. Then two sets of barriers to hop over, a bunch of tight switch backs in the grass. I went down quickly in one turn where a guy on a mountain bike couldn't quite make one of the sharp turns. I rolled up on his back wheel, buzzed his tire then tipped over. He had pretty much come to a complete stop. So I just hopped off and pushed my bike through the remaining turns and quickly remounted and headed back into the dirt section. The dirt was pretty much all about maintaining your speed and not letting any one pass you, big ring hammering! The then grassy sections was where guys were starting to hurt, and you could easily pass them as their momentum slowed. Tire pressure was key on Sunday. Started off high, then after a few practice laps lowered it down to about 55 front 60 rear. I ran the WTB Cross Wolf tires, which I was very happy with. They hooked up well, and rolled really fast on the hardpack. Everyone kept saying the Michelin Mud II's were the tire to run around Sacramento, but my buddy ended up with 2 flats on them, so dunno... I ended up 19th out of 50. Not too bad for very little training over the past month. Next race is October 11th. Oh and in some of the photos, it may look like I'm missing some teeth. No I haven't gone full redneck, it was just dirt crusted on to them...

Great race course! Thanks to Team BEER and SacramentoCX for putting it all together!

Land Park Criterium 2008

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Originally uploaded by rodneycox68

On Saturday I raced in the Land Park Criterium in Sacramento. I entered in the Elite 5 category, same as last year. Criteriums are not really my thing, but this course it one of the safer ones around and I wanted to redeem myself from last year. It's a big wide 1 mile loop around the Land Park Golf Course on closed roads. There is a tricky S-type chicane turn section and a couple of other higher speed corners. My goal was to just stay up near the front, top 15 or so though most of the course, then move up to the top 5 through the corners. This race was 35 minutes. It started out with a neutral lap just to we could see what it was like to ride the course with 50 other riders. Elite 5 is the beginner category so there's obviusly some nervous and squirrely riding going on. As the first real lap kicked in the speed was fairly mellow in the low 20s. Into the frist set of turns some yo yo clipped his pedal into one of the corners. Not sure if it was the same guy, but I heard the pedal clipping again, and again and again. You think he would have learned maybe the first or second tome to not pedal thought that sharp corner? There was some bumping and sudden braking, someone skidded up on my rear wheel, and I had to do a couple of quick evasive maneuvers throughout the race. The group would always seem to come back together on the straight sections, then get broken up in the corners. The key was to stay as close to the front as possible so after the corners you didn't have to do too much work to get back to the front. I was hanging in there pretty comfortably and in the final lap somehow drifted back to about mid pack going into the corners. Someone went down on my left (perhaps the guy who kept clipping his pedals), then someone plowed into him and went over the bars. I saw it out the corner of my eye so it freaked my out a bit. When I looked ahead I had lost about 10 bike lengths to the main pack. So I cranked it up and gave it everything I had. I finally caught on to the tail end of the main group passing a few on the run into the line and finished 22nd out of 50. I think I would have finished a bit higher were it not for that crash. I'm just stoked to have finished the race this year as last year I got dropped and pulled off the course with about 2 laps to go.

This was the best photo I could find of myself in the race. Thanks to rodneycox68 on Flickr! That's me in the blue, orange and white Rio Strada kit.