I had no idea that I was racing above an old City dump. Cauze, I think that I ran over several old washing machines, hubcaps, and beer bottles. Holly smokes. The terrain is terrible. Lots of 3" ripples everywhere. Nothing is smooth. For this race, I choose to battle against the C racers on my singlespeed cx bike. I re-armed the bike with new gearing, 42x18. This gear proved to be fairly good on the bumpy flat sections. However, once on the pavement, I lost time by spinning out, that is, too slow on the pavement. The two steep hill sections were perfectly fine with the 42x18 gearing, as long as, I had momentum going into the hill and a clear landing path on top. I did have a couple issues with the bike: 1) For the second race in a row, the seatpost dropped a little lower during the race and the saddle rocked back and forth. It's time to dump the seat post. 2) By going with brake only levers, the grip area is a little smaller and a bit sketchy. I'm certain that I lost plenty of time with the lame brake only levers since I was trying to keep the bike under control over the bumpy section. Very uncomfortable situation. So, it's time to drop the drop bars and install a mou
ntain bike flat bar with longer stem. The flat bars will allow me to easily hammer on the most bumpy terrains while remaining in control of the bike. The Schwable front tire worked perfectly again. I choose to use a smooth-ish WTB tire on the back. It worked fine on the very steep climb sections and hooked-up perfectly on the flats. I'll probably stick with this tire combination for the rest of the series. I did have some
problems with the pedals. At the top of the climb, I found myself popping out of them, which resulted in loosing 3 or 4 spots. This problem happened 3 times during the race. Overall, I'm getting better at racing the singlespeed. There is a learning curve on how to race it against the multispeed bikes. Lesson A: you just have to assume that you'll spin-out on the very flat sections. This means, you'll need to make up time on the remainder of the course.
I had no idea that I was racing above an old City dump. Cauze, I think that I ran over several old washing machines, hubcaps, and beer bottles. Holly smokes. The terrain is terrible. Lots of 3" ripples everywhere. Nothing is smooth. For this race, I choose to battle against the C racers on my singlespeed cx bike. I re-armed the bike with new gearing, 42x18. This gear proved to be fairly good on the bumpy flat sections. However, once on the pavement, I lost time by spinning out, that is, too slow on the pavement. The two steep hill sections were perfectly fine with the 42x18 gearing, as long as, I had momentum going into the hill and a clear landing path on top. I did have a couple issues with the bike: 1) For the second race in a row, the seatpost dropped a little lower during the race and the saddle rocked back and forth. It's time to dump the seat post. 2) By going with brake only levers, the grip area is a little smaller and a bit sketchy. I'm certain that I lost plenty of time with the lame brake only levers since I was trying to keep the bike under control over the bumpy section. Very uncomfortable situation. So, it's time to drop the drop bars and install a mou
ntain bike flat bar with longer stem. The flat bars will allow me to easily hammer on the most bumpy terrains while remaining in control of the bike. The Schwable front tire worked perfectly again. I choose to use a smooth-ish WTB tire on the back. It worked fine on the very steep climb sections and hooked-up perfectly on the flats. I'll probably stick with this tire combination for the rest of the series. I did have some 
problems with the pedals. At the top of the climb, I found myself popping out of them, which resulted in loosing 3 or 4 spots. This problem happened 3 times during the race. Overall, I'm getting better at racing the singlespeed. There is a learning curve on how to race it against the multispeed bikes. Lesson A: you just have to assume that you'll spin-out on the very flat sections. This means, you'll need to make up time on the remainder of the course. 
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