Race report: Beacon Cross
By Ian Landau
I’D NEVER BEEN TO BEACON before this year. It’s certainly one of those legendary regional races you always hear about. It’s got tradition.
So I knew in advance about some of the hallmarks: the so-called Amphitheater of Pain and the beach run along the lake. Coming as it does the day before HPCX—rechristened “Cat and Kitten Cross Presented by HPCX” for 2009—I mostly knew Beacon was different from HPCX, which I took to mean that Beacon was flat and fast.
So it was with loaded expectations that I hitched a ride with my teammate and cross nemesis, Eloy, down to the far reaches of southern New Jersey. We arrived in time to ride the course once before the Cat. 4 race. I was not disappointed.
It was unlike any other course I’ve raced on. The couple of long, flat, straight stretches through the woods on wide hardpack dirt trails were clearly going to hurt. The beach run and the Amphitheater of Pain were as advertised. But any sandy sections were packed down by the recent rains and totally ridable.
It wasn’t all flat, but it was a power course more suited to a strong road rider. I thought it was a course that’d suit Eloy, but at first he didn’t seem to think so, saying he felt he was better on slower courses. As for me, I didn’t think I’d be able to even up our season-long head-to-head series on this day. Eloy was up 2-1.
It’s amazing the kinds of delusions you can sucker yourself into. I’d thought earlier this year that I could be racing for top 10 overall in the MAC masters B category. Ha! It’s not that I had a bad race at Beacon. I rode as hard as I could. It’s just that my fitness is not at the level of my ambition. Managing that disconnect is tough mentally but must be done to avoid getting to down on oneself.
THE RACE
I started on the front row (I registered very, very early), faded through the ridiculously long uphill start, came onto the grass in the top 20, lost a few spots as the race wore on, got passed by Eloy, passed Eloy when he dropped his bike on the beach and his rear brake cable came unhinged, got passed again by Eloy, tried to catch photographer Michael Kirk for 25th place, didn’t catch him, and finished 26th. (See complete results from Beacon here.)
Eloy was 22nd and rightfully thought he’d robbed himself of a top 20 by crashing. He also went up 3-1 in the season series.
In the car on the way home, I ceded the series to him. He is stronger than me. I cannot ride my bike as fast as him.
I didn’t have to stop on the side of the course in a gagging fit. Nice!
I can’t say I was happy with 26th, but I can say that I didn’t have to stop on the side of the course in a gagging fit. Nice! I did have to slow down once for a slight scare, which is annoying because I lost a couple of places then, and that was the difference between cracking the top 25. Oh well. At least it was a step in the right direction not to actually have to come to a dead stop by the side of the course in heaves.
I’ve gone to seven races this cross season, and it looks like I have about five or six to go. I could say this is pretty much the halfway point of my season. It seems somewhat impossible to think I’ll get significantly faster by the end of it at Phillipsburg the first weekend of December. But maybe I can. I will certainly try.
It’s about adjusting your expectations, I guess, or matching your ambition to the reality of your fitness. Mine has been out of whack this season. So now I’ll adjust. I should be racing just for fun—it’s cross!—but I don’t think I can entirely let go of my ambition to do well—it is a race after all.
Here’s hoping that I can get some more results that I’m happy with.
And maybe beat Eloy again.
Ian Landau is a contributing editor to CyclingReporter.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is a familiar face at road and cyclocross races up and down the East Coast.
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