Eureka!

The Busted Helmet crash two years ago.  The Pinky Finger crash last year.  The Puff of Dust crash this year... PIR has been more than a little unkind to me.  I've never been fully comfortable at that venue.  It is different than a road race.  It is so wide, the pack is unconfined, able to wind and weave around the 60 foot wide track.  At a road race, nobody is really moving around too fast because the road is so narrow.  It's easy to just hold a position relative to another person and keep people from penetrating your comfort zone.  But at PIR, everybody is pretty much free to ride anywhere they want.  They come over the top of you, sweep around you in corners, cut close through a gap near your handlebars.  Especially in the fields with Cat 1/2 riders.  Nobody seems to respect your space, yet everyone but me seems to be comfortable.  Obviously I am doing something wrong.

Today, in the 1/2/3 field at PIR, it all clicked.  I mean, it CLICKED.  I was perfectly comfortable.  I was at the front of the field, at the back, in the middle.  Last week, in the same field, I was a wreck.  Totally sketched.  A head case.  I surfed the back basically the whole race.  This week, none of that.  What changed?

First thing was, I started worrying about what the pack was doing 10-15 rows ahead rather than being paranoid about what individuals were doing right around me.  Contact is normal in racing.  Not something to strive for, but it happens, and it's not a big deal really.  My problem was I was anticipating potential contact, rather than letting it happen.  Looking around at the riders around me, I would hear and see out of the corner of my eye that someone was coming up around me and I would shy away.  This is what caused the pinky crash into the wall.  Or I would be riding between two people in a gap and one would move towards me and I would shy away from the movement.  This is what caused the puff of dust crash.  I shied away right into the other guy, got tangled up and slid down on my ass.  Maybe it's a subconscious response to my busted helmet crash (of which I remember nothing) but it is perfectly unhelpful and sometimes downright dangerous.

Today I flowed.  I sat up on the hoods, looked up ahead and I flowed.  I got up to the front with no problem; even sprinted unsuccessfully for a prime (turns out, trying to come around a pro leadout train is hard) and spent some time off the front.  I held position around corners and only got yelled at once for a totally unsatisfactory reason.  Things are coming together.