Soaring Eagle, The Sequel

I looked at the weather report last night and it showed a nice dry day with a low of 40 for the time I'd be arriving at the race and about 45 during my race. Since I've been lied to by those "weathermen" before I brought a good selection of clothing to the race....Glad I did. As I started heading up toward Sammamish there were cars coming down covered in snow! And as I got up top there was snow everywhere. WTF...It's just about April! It was also 34 degrees which was a far cry from 40. Thank goodness the race was exactly the same as before so I didn't have to pre-ride and possibly get wet and cold. Instead I rode up and down the road for a while and then lined up for the race. I was soo cold as the start was late that I still had my jacket and warm up pants on and Rory called the lineup so quickly I barely got my clothing situated for the start. The there were only two things different in this race than the previous one....First, the parks department had put gravel on part of the fire road so everyone was fighting for that thin line but it ran out and then we found the second thing that had changed. Our race wasn't on dirt but was MUD. I don't mean the 90% water 10% dirt mud puddle stuff, but the creamiest peanutbutter you've every seen. And as the race went on it started to dry up a bit and it was HARD to go forward. I'm a small guy. 132lbs and this course required POWER. I don't have that and it showed as I hurt something fierce just to try to be competitive. But then it seemed my power was waining as forward motion was getting harder and harder but then I noticed something...my rear was going everywhere and I finally stopped and found that I had maybe 5lbs of pressure in my rear tire. I stopped and struggled to get my CO2 gun loaded and cranked up the pressure. Wow, I can roll again! So in I came in 8th out of 14 which was disappointing as I was hoping the technical nature of this course would play to my strengths. Not! So now I'm in 3rd place in the series for Expert Men 40+ and another guys is only 3 points behind me. Man this is dissapointing. Hopefully this will be my drop. So now I'm home and putting stuff away and cleaning my bike. Dirtiest my bike has EVERY been and that is saying something as I've ridden in some terrible stuff. It took me 90 minutes to clean all my stuff. Good news is I got some nice pictures of the sport racers!