Somewhere In There....

Somewhere in this picture is a front derailleur:



Here is the rear derailleur:



The complete picture:



So the question is how did I make this mess. Wellllll, it was a beautiful day in Kansas City today. The sun was shining, and they just had a few days of freezing rain. I raced the last race of the day. The earlier races apparently were pretty icy and snowy. The temperature warmed up to the mid 30's and things began to melt. My start position was around 60 out of around 120. I have never been in a close quarters race with so many people before. There have been more at some of the longer races, but it is very different when you know you are going to be on a 1.9 mile circuit with so many people. The start was crazy, but manageable, nobody did anything stupid. The turn off the pavement was 90 degrees through a dip and up a rise, great potential for trouble so I purposefully stayed to the outside of the turn and all was good. I went down in an off camber turn on the first lap, recovered quickly and was back in business. It was to be a five lap race. The key was apply power when prudent and be smart the rest of the time. By the time it was over, I finished 9th.

I am pretty happy with the results, could have been a bit better without the fall, maybe 6 or 7, but not much better than that. It was a fun time, although the usual cyclocross pain was involved. Tomorrow is the big race!!