I hurt my shoulder. More specifically, I had a partial separation of my AC.

See? You’d think that x-rays would be a little more high-tech…

I was going to write about how sometimes being injured can lead to becoming emotionally fragile and possibly depression, but some stuff happened and I was too emotionally fragile and depressed to write about it. Eventually, as time went on, it became time to write about my latest race.

There were a lot of things going through my mind, leading up to this race. I wanted to do well to help bump out some of my poorer scores in the series (best 8 out of 14). I had recently bought a new wheel that I haven’t had a chance to ride on, so I wasn’t sure how that was going to perform. I had ridden my bike twice, for a total of 23 miles. I was out of shape.

Not to mention, I was still healing and probably a little more fragile that I wanted to be. I’m not sure how hard of a hit I could take from a tree or the ground before my arm would fall off completely.

We start at the whistle and all race down the gravel road and turn into the single track. I ended up probably in 9th or 10th place by that time, but I wasn’t worried, since I wasn’t really hoping for a top 10 finish. The single track started to get narrow and there were people behind me while the people in the front were pulling away. I didn’t push hard at all to keep up, and surprisingly the people behind me weren’t breathing down my neck to pass me.

The first part was a lot of ups and downs with tight corners all over the place. I didn’t know this course as well as I thought, so I just kept it slow and I ended up not getting passed until the trail opened up much further on.

I do say, that while my descending and cornering weren’t the best (descending while cornering was the worse), I still managed to crank out some good speed going up the hills. The guys in front of me would get away from me, but I would totally catch up with them on the next climb.

There were a few hills that I didn’t ride up, because the people in front of me were walking. I ended up getting passed while walking a few places, which I would try to get back, only to get passed again.

Towards the end I was pretty tired, but I kept my legs still going. Then my rear brake went really squishy. That slowed me down a bit, since I wasn’t confident in my stopping power.

Right before the finish line, there was a guy that was in my group right behind me and I could see a wide corner coming up where I knew he was going to try to pass me. I sped up and held a tighter line on the inside, and when he tried to come even more on the inside of that, he couldn’t get the speed to pass me. After that it was a sprint to the finish and I managed to hold him off to come in 17th place. Which was nice, since that is better than I did at the GHORBA race and also Solavaca, points wise.

My shoulder did ache pretty bad after the race, but I iced it and took some drugs. What made it all better, though, was the In N Out that I got.