Sunday's race went much better than I thought it did. Creve Coeur usually dishes a deceptively hard course. This one did not seem quite so bad though. The warm, dry weather and long, paved downhill made for a pretty fast course.

A first turn hairpin after a couple hundred feet strung the pack out before reaching the barriers. My start was average but the mid-pack start was far better than last week. A few folks went by me early and then I worked my back past others. The whole day seemed very average. Nothing special happened. I was clean over the barriers and the bumpy section that claimed so many riders during the day posed no problems for me. The toughest part was the uneven dirt uphill to the paved road. A few seconds of grinding wasn't that bad, though.

As I said, the race seemed average and I thought my placing was an average 11th-13th. After calling number in the A race for Buddy I looked at the results and somehow I finished in 6th. I had no clue. There must have been a few guys ahead of me that didn't finish or something. Usually, I have a pretty good idea how I placed but this one was a total shock.

Next week is Spanish Lake. This is a return trip after not having raced there in a couple years. Spanish Lake's flat land makes it hard to design a challenging cyclocross course but there are a few little bumps that can be creatively utilized. The features about the park that most stick in my mind is the bumpy field that we use and the large amount of gravel road that makes for some tricky handling if you turn at speed.