Rough pre state road race week

As of right now, I'm pretty much ready to go for the state championship road race tomorrow. Somewhere around 90% I guess. Monday I didn't think I would be doing any racing. It felt like I had the flu or something as the day went on at work. I rode in, but actually had to get a lift home cause I was feeling so bad. By Wednesday morning I was feeling better. At least good enough to make it to the Wednesday night cyclocross practice.

I thought I had learned my lesson a few years ago about jumping right into hard cross riding without doing some kind of preparation a few weeks before (like running). It's pretty easy to pull a muscle, get injured, or best case be extremely  sore for several days after the cyclocross practice sessions without toughening yourself up first. I figured this year I would just kind of ease into it a few laps at a time in the practice sessions. Anyway, I started the last practice pretty fast and was getting racy with Chris Drummond and B$ and ended up pulling my groin muscle or something. There was a super high speed dismount section and a kind of weird dismount-turn and then run up a big hill section that were killing my fragile roadie legs.

Everything seems ok just riding, but I'm hoping I didn't screw up the first part of the cross season with a nagging injury before things have barely gotten started. It's a lot better today, so hopefully by next Tuesday, I'll be able to do a little light running and see how it feels. I got a couple new sets of tires for the cross bike, so I'm pretty pumped up to give those a try.

Anyway, the road race tomorrow should be interesting. Not sure how big the turnout is going to be, but the 1's and 2's will be racing together. The big difference this year is that the 1's and 2's will be scored separately, so there will be a cat 2 state champion this year. The only riders on the team in the race is Brian Parks and myself. That might make things a little more difficult, or it could be just about right, we'll see.