Today hasn’t been the best day-before-a-race day.

The weather has been foul. Yesterday, I made the trip from Memphis in blowing snow and heavy clouds. The weather system soaked the ground at the Louisville CX course, creating a thick, sticky layer of mud. Ryan, who had been in St. Louis for business since Monday, was there ahead of me and pre-rode in horrible conditions (remember that part)

His heat race was at 10:20 this morning. As he was getting ready to pre-ride, I put his “A” bike in the stand to lube the chain, which was dried out from the previous day’s ride/pressure wash. I quickly realized that his bottom bracket was toasted. I quickly borrowed a BB tool (yeah, I suck at packing the tool box) and put my bike’s FSA bottom bracket into his bike. Parking lot wrench/repair extraordinaire.

His heat race ended up sucking a little. What had been deep, saturated mud was now frozen into solid, icy ruts from tape to tape.

Riding was treacherous (possibly understatement of the year, and it’s only January).

My original plan had been to pre-ride during the official noon to 12:45 open course time. However, with our quiver of bikes being one bottom bracket short, I had to deal with that first. I started by visiting the Black Spring bike shop across from the hotel. Luckily, the guy there let me make myself at home in his shop, and I was able to rehab the “A” bike bottom bracket and re-install the BB into my bike. By then there was no way to get to the open course time.

I ended up riding down to the course and watching the tail end of the men’s 30-34 race. Not long after, I was about to leave when I noticed that random people were riding on the course. I figured I’d have at it as well.

What followed was a crash course in how to ride on solid, rutted ice. I did my best to float the front wheel and maintain speed. It worked about 90% of the time. The other 5% of the time, my front wheel would grab in a deep, sideways rut and slam me onto the ice. OW.

I was discouraged. I’ve trained incredibly hard, and to have my race boil down to who can crash the least on the ice would be somewhat disappointing. Luckily, the Powers that Be have decided to re-route and re-stake some of the worst parts of the course. So, now I should only crash once per lap instead of 5 times per lap, and be able to get my heart rate over 120 bpm.

Here goes nothing…