Shaker Village XC Challenge

On Saturday May 15th Heather and I went up to Canterbury, NH for the Shaker Village XC Challenge (results). This is the 4th race in the CARS series and the toughest of all the races. This is a true cross country course with plenty of ups and downs, lots of bad footing, some dirt roads, and some mud thrown in for good measure. My goal coming into this race was to survive in one piece, this is where I got hurt last year, and to just maintain my 2nd place standing in the CARS series. I did not want to push myself to hard at this race due to an incident I had on Thursday when I tripped and fell knee first into a big rock. Yeah....not too smooth. The knee has some swelling and its pretty painful on ups and downs.

Once Heather and I got our race numbers I went out for a short 2.5 mile warm up. The knee was OK, but I was still getting pain on the ups and downs. I got over to the starting line and saw the usual CARS suspects MacKenzie Kilpatrick, Scott Clark, Dan Verrington, Tim Cox, Taylor Annett, and a new face in Connor Jennings, who is running very fast these days. I put myself in the 2nd row behind some high schoolers and soon we were off and running.

This race started out pretty weird. Connor shot right to the front followed by one other runner, and then a large group of people who just went out slow. I was holding back because of my knee injury, but almost everyone else seemed to be holding back too. The early part of this course has a lot of downs and I wanted to take those pretty easy before I tried to press the pace at all. I must have been hovering around 6th or 7th for a good part of the early stages of the race. Once we hit some of the flatter sections I started to move up, getting past Scott Clark, Neal Graves, and a couple others. Before long we hit the dirt road section and I started to move up to Mackenzie who was chasing down Connor. By the end of the dirt road I was in 3rd place and trying to catch MacKenzie. We made the turn onto "The Hill" and started our way up. This hill is covered in grass, the ground is soft, and the hill goes on for a very long time. You feel like the hill is sucking the life out of you as you make your way up. I lost some ground on Mackenzie and MacKenzie was making up some ground on Connor. As we hit the top of the hill Connor went straight were the course went right. Connor made it about 20-25 meters past the turn before he turned back as people yelled to him that he was going the wrong way. By the time Connor made it back onto the course I had reached the corner and soon all three of us were together as we headed down a steep hill.....which my knee was not liking. I backed off a bit and a gap opened up. This was pretty much the end of my chance to stay with them. I tried to battle back but I could not make up any time. We made our way back up hill and towards the finish. With one more loop around a field and to the finish I was out of time and MacKenzie and Connor kicked to the finish while I just relaxed and finished up the race. Connor out kicked MacKenzie by a second and I finished 13 seconds back of Connor for third place.

I was pretty happy with how the race went considering how my knee was feeling. Heather did not have such a great race as she had to drop out with an injury. She has been battling a foot issue now for a few weeks that just does not seem to be getting better.

Results

MENS CARS STANDINGS

1. MacKenzie Kilpatrick 4000

2. Chris Mahoney 3932

3. Scott Clark 3821

4. Taylor Annett 3811

5. Rod Viens 3791