October 17 Cross Crusade: Equestrian Center, Wilsonville

It was awful, to begin with. There was no rain, it was warm, people were happy and, worse, agreeable. By all accounts, these conditions are difficult for the vast talent portfolio of Yard Sale CX, of which I'm YSCX XL. Under normal conditions (soaked to the soul and cold to the marrow), YSCX thrives. By thrive, I mean, of course, shows up. Under these wonderfully inclement conditions, we'd typically only have to compete with the heartiest ilk--the bearded, the tattooed and the men.

A brief synapses of what went right/wrong.

Sarah won the Women B class, simply by coming out of nowhere and sandbagging her classification. This is a brilliant strategy that I've thought we could all deploy except for the facts, that we're no longer "out of nowhere" --if you don't know YSCX, you don't know shit-- and that the Russian judges who run this operation haven't created categories so shitty that we could legitimately (or illegitimately) dominate.

What they've left us with is an unreasonably early starting gun for the old and slow categories, virtually pushing us over a ledge to gruesome humiliation among the young and fast. With tens of minutes of training this year, God bless, I was able dig deep and do what Phil Liggett called, "turn himself inside out," when referring to the Herculean effort of Tour cyclist and my eating coach, Andy Schleck, in the 2010 race.

In any case, I felt myself and felt myself growing stronger more confident through the first 500 meters of the race. Someone who's never

studied geography, cartography or even looked at a map, however, plotted hills into this race course, and more than one. You can say a lot about the Russian judges who run the Cross Crusade operations, but double the negative of these observations for the course setters. If I could figure out how to drop in another photo here, you'd see the determined anguish that I conjured to get through that lap and other like it, but these others being progressively slower.

At the end of the day, I finished a respectable 80th out of a field of 89, plus seven DNF, which, I assume, means they're from East Germany. But to legitimately outpace nine Americans and seven East Germans, who, we all know have a reputation for doping, speaks volumes of velocity.

I'll post more photos as soon as I read the manual on this blog site. These photos will show, beyond the shadow of a doubt, shadows and doubt.