Iron Cross Lite and Iron Cross IV

By Dee Dee Winfield

WOW! What a weekend! Where to begin? First we'd like to thank Morgan, Hillary, Alisha, and Nathan for letting us crash at their place. I say crash b/c we certainly didn't sleep. Our little girl was pretty wound up and all excited about the keetie, keetie, keetie (i.e. their cats) that she kept us up most of the night. Around 1a.m. Buck was holding Cadence trying to settle her in to a nice slumber and she just starts saying "keetie, keetie" over and over again. Well, we were pretty exhausted and I'll admit a bit frustrated but neither of us could hold back the laughter which
proceeded to gear her back up again. Needless to say she is easily stimulated.

Mel gave a nice race report for Saturday so I will stick to the Sunday details. The Iron Cross is the longest cross race in America and come to find out there was actually a competitor that came all the way from England just for this race.

The race begins with one lap of the Iron Cross Lite cross course and then out to the brutality of the 60 mile course. About 8 miles into it I went to pass someone on some rocky rutted out fire road and wham, all of a sudden I find myself face down in the dirt. I am really not sure what happened but I landed hard on my right knee. It had been a while since I had crashed and I think I had forgotten what that felt like.

So the fun had just begun and it was a tell tale sign that today was going
to be trying to say the least. Shortly after the first check point I realized my rear tire was rubbing. This was nothing new to me, it has happened at this race every year b/c the technical parts knock my wheel out of place due to a long standing problem in my rear drop outs. It not being new though, did not make it any less frustrating. I adjusted the wheel only to have it start rubbing again shortly thereafter.

I rode like this for a while feeling the energy being zapped from my legs and my mind. At Ckpt. 2, I looked back and saw Mandy right on me. I was a bit discouraged after having to stop a few times and readjust the wheel. We rode together for a while and had some crazy downhill adventures which we laughed about afterwards. Then there was the chain. I have a forbidden gear b/c my chain had to be shortened (can we say rigged?) and I chose that gear. UH OH! I thought for sure the race was over at that point but one of my fellow racers by the name of Mike stopped to help me and we were able to fix the problem.

I was able to make up some time on some of the steeper, technical parts for I had many gears and eeked out the win by only: 50 seconds on a 60 mile course. It was a tough day both mentally and physically but the BBQ afterwards was oh so worth it. Many thanks to all the supporters and volunteers out there along with the positive attitudes of all the racers!!!