Along with Brian Patrick of Onsight Media and 303 Cycling, Annette of Mountain Moon Photography captured perfectly a moment I'm not soon to forget during this lifetime anyway. Here's the review of my "Joey's OK" moment from my own personal perspective, I'm sure you all have your own similar occurrences during your cycling careers, but the video and the pictures help tremendously remind what was going on in my head at each of these moments....
Let's start at the call up of the 55+ category at Xilinx, it's a great bunch of guys, and plenty are still extremely fit and fast, and it's an honor to line up against the likes of riders and friends (some new) like State and National Champion Gary Thacker and the rest of these elite athletes. Most of these guys do not know much about me as a rider, I know Gary a bit, and I remember rolling up to the inside of row one at call up next to him and Gary jokingly saying to be careful that he did not run me into the curb at the start. I wanted the hole shot to the dirt, but was not sure I could gain it against a pretty stacked field with names like Wade, Herwig and McGlaughlin in there. The charge up the start straight was clean, and I got away enough to keep it buried until the bunny hop to the dirt. I found myself at the front, with no idea who was behind. THE problem at this point was I came into the dirt hot and almost overcooked into the course tape. I was redlined on the straight into the right hander from the effort, pretty much cross eyed at that point, but psyched to be in control of the pace as we hit the log and the tree section on lap one. In my mind I knew a rider or two would go off the front on the pavement that followed, and my plan was to grab those wheels and hopefully be in the break early.
I had ridden the log a half dozen times prior to the race with no clearance issues, but when I came in a slightly different angle, and tight on the bike from being worked from the sprint at the start, I cased my chain ring and slightly pitched forward at a very poor time on the log which started the now well recorded sequence. I remember going over the front end and immediately thinking "you just blew it".......dickhead.
At this point I'm thankful for a fairly soft dirt landing, and the split second I had to get my hands out in front of me to help break the fall..
I'm already thinking about trying to get out of the way and back in the race, unaware of any injury issues...get the bike and get back in the game.
And then Bret Wade had the misfortune of being second wheel, and unable to avoid my carnage goes down as well....
Believe it or not I'm apologizing to Bret right here for fucking up his and my race, fortunately we were both able to remount and ride and complete the task at hand....Gary Thacker had the good fortune of space and leads out the rest of the field from here...
Shaken and very embarrassed I was able to remount quickly with a right shoulder stinger (re-aggravating an old shoulder injury) and a couple of slightly bruised ribs and continue the race. After assessing injuries up on the road and losing a few more places after the shock of the crash I was able to regroup during lap one, then get back to racing on lap two, thankfully.
And of course the remainder of the race there were no issues at the SOB of a log. So the moral of the story is this, it's Cyclocross, there is no crying in Cyclocross, eating dirt is part of this game, shaking it off is as well....and I love it.
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