I've sort of been looking forward to this race all season - I knew it was the midwest regional championship and I wanted to claim that title. Problem was it wasn't available to Cat 2 age groupers which I didn't find out until the day before. Ultimately it's pretty insignificant so whatever.
We arrived Friday afternoon and pre rode. The course is pretty good, plenty of technical stuff and enough climbing. Only problem is that it's pretty short, one lap hovers around 20 minutes and the cat 2 do only 3 laps. Usually they have the comp cat 2's separated from the sport cat 2's with the comp race doing more laps of the elite course - but because of the nature of this one race everything gets a bit messed up.
As far as race length, course options and starting waves, the normal WORS races are actually better for comp riders. Probably even the cat 1's as they would get more time on the course.
So I was feeling excellent, legs were in great shape, nothing left to do but race. We take off and I'm gone and out of sight in 2 minutes, I really wanted to push it hard because it was only 1 hour long. I'm passing dudes left and right. I'm near the end of the first lap and following a rider who I know from the wave in front of me, and we come upon a section where we need to make a hard right turn into some singletrack. The guy i'm following makes a shallow right turn and cuts through the course to the next climbing section. About 3 seconds after this happens I realize what we did. Ultimately we bypassed around a minutes worth of singletrack. The way the course winds on itself and the poor marking at that corner allowed it to happen. As a matter of fact, we weren't the only ones to do it. We weren't bushwacking to do this either, it was a wide dirt/grass path section. Anyway, I decide to just keep going at that point and figure it out later. When I go through the start finish I see the race director and yell to him to fix the marking, people are cutting trail. 2nd and 3rd time through they moved the arrow and added course tape to better direct you.
Second lap and I'm suffering a bit more and not riding as clean. By the 3rd lap I start to settle down a bit and ride cleaner. I finish alright. My finish time was just over 1:01. By the time I change and talk to a bunch of other riders about what happened I'm summoned to the timing trailer. The officials are aware of what happened and the guy I was talking to was recommending that we add time (about a minute) to those of us that cut that section as opposed to DQ'ing. Fine with me, that still leaves me 1st. Well, what ended up happening was moving me down to 3rd because the next 2 riders were within still within a close enough time that they felt it would be the fair thing to do. I'm not really arguing so that is fine too. The only thing that bugs me is the course marking, and the fact that I can't really know how I truly compare time wise with the other riders if this didn't happen. I think some of the times got screwed up a bit b/c I finished 1 minute up on riders the wave in front of me. Add a minute to my time for a penalty and we're even. But they started 1 minute earlier so I would have ended up being a minute faster still - somehow some people's times are wrong and it's too much to figure it out.
I did run into a few KC folks, namely those of the Ethos team. Maybe I should just take the advice of Garet and CTFU.
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