Remember how hot it was last week? Yeah, it's been hot and summery for about a month. Today I headed over to Silverdale to do the Whaling Days Crit. After a few days off after Lake Stevens, I had a good race at Seward (the weekly training crit), and was looking forward to todays race.
The forecast called for "few showers". So we drive the 90 minutes over to Silverdale (for a 30 minute crit), but that's where Deb's from so it seemed like a good idea. We drive through some rain on the way out there, but it's mostly OK.
Ten minutes before the race it starts pouring, and is still coming down when we go to the line. I do one lap around the course before the race and it's pretty slick. Plus the pack is small - about 10 of us and by far the smallest pack I've been in a long time. The course is less than 1K and has 7 corners and should be a blast.
But remember, it hasn't rained in a month. In the prior race a guy had gone down and broke his elbow, so we were delayed. That was fine with me. As we go off, it starts raining hard again and I'm having TST (a race this spring that was brutally cold and wet, very near Silverdale) flashbacks. Corners 1-5 are terrifying but we're moving fairly slow. The water is deep on the backside and there are wide stripes of traffic paint on the road - it's slick stuff. In case you don't know, roads are slickest when it's been dry for a while and a bunch of dirt, oil and grime has built up, then it rains.
The last two corners are kind of a zig-zag. You take a left then an immediate right, so even in the dry you need to set it up right. I hit corner 6 a little hot on the inside, and then set up for corner 7. As I apex the corner, I want to move up a few places (it's already strung out).
So, like normal, I shift and start to move forward to stand so I can move up on the outside on the start/finish straight. As soon as I unweight my back wheel and give it some torque - vwoop! - I'm on the ground with people riding into and over me. But the nice thing about ice-slick pavement is that it doesn't do to much body damage either. The bad part is that the two people I take down: both my Zoka team mates. John rides on and kind of does his own race. Trevor takes his free lap, gets back in, races for about 10 minutes and then is overcome by sanity and pulls out. Not worth it. So (knock on wood) that's my only racing mishap of the year so far, and short of a few bumps and bruises I'm fine, which is lucky. We crashed near the pit and the guys came running to help us. They reach for my bike and say "free lap, no problem" and are puzzled when I say "nah, I'm done". No need to press my luck...