Race Report

Race Report by Jerry Cherra

Let's talk about some mountain bike racing.

Billy Cross Racing - Vet Expert (31-40)
Finished 2nd of more than 10 (don't know exact field size yet)
Saturday April 3rd

This is my first race report for AV so it may not be very interesting, but here it goes anyway:

Billy Cross is up at Lake Sonoma and is the most technical race course in this area. 4.50-5.00 mile laps with 650 ft. of climbing per lap...We did 4 laps. There was a solid pro turn out as there were 7 Pro men (Mark Weir of WTB/Santa Cruz smoked everybody) and a half dozen or so Pro women including Katerina Hanusova from Luna Chix.

They mass started all the Semi-pro men, Expert men, Pro and expert women. I had some problems getting clipped in and fell behind. When I started catching up I got run off the course by a guy who decided he wanted my line too. Needless to stay it took some work to catch up. Billy Cross is 95% single track so it's pretty difficult to pass. I hammered out the first lap and passed quite a few people and the 2nd lap went fairly well. The 3rd lap I was a complete mess. I was really struggling with the technical aspects of the course and I lost some ground. The 4th lap was the smoothest (that was really my main goal going in) and I picked up what I lost and then some. I really couldn't tell where I was in within the field because it was so spread out and they assigned the same series numbers to multiple categories (Pro, Semi-pro, Expert were all 100's).

I really didn't expect to podium at this race. I was simply using it to polish my technical singletrack skills and improve lactate management. So, 2nd place was a nice surprise.

Thanks,

Jerry

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