So it was time again for the highlight of the weekend and another CX race. Yesterday I was out for a bit of tjuvträning and testing the XT pedals I had moved over from my MTB. It was pretty wet everywhere so I saw pretty quickly that the XKing tires are not absolutely perfect when there is mud. But I did learn a bit more about how to handle the bike. On my way home I felt my vevparti coming loose so I tightened that up and this morning on my ride over to Skatås everything was clunking away making a hell of a noise. That brought me down as much as my lack of sleep. Later on I found out it was because I had the arm too tight against the bottom bracket so I think it is fixed now. But I should probably change the bottom bracket anyway.

Warm-up was some corners in a little sand field and that was also going very wrong. The starts went better this week since I just concentrated on pedalling rather than waiting till my shoe was clicked in. They click in sooner or later just automatically. Still, my starts were going very well.

For the first 'race' we did a tempo lap around a portion of the track and the fastest would get to wear a leader jersey (Hisingens CK shirt). Björn did not seem to be so thrilled to wear that but ya gotta love the Gbg humour. I nailed my start and accelerated well along the back straight even though I instantly felt sick. It is tempo so that is the right feeling. Things were going superb and my dismount and run up the hill were great but on my remount I slipped on the pedal and lost 2 seconds so I had to put in a serious sprint to come in at 1:16. The fastest was 1:06 and correcting for the 2s meant I was only off by 8 seconds. Not bad.

Then it was time for the real 5-lap race where once again I got to start at the front. I was next to Sven and he pretty much took me out in the start because I had nowhere to ride but I got a start anyway and was pretty far from last. I passed Lasse at this first part and was right on the tail of a group of around 5 riders. It was kind of crowded still so I was kind of calm and just concentrated on not running into anyone. At the end of lap 1 I was behind a woman from Uddevalla CK and I passed on one of the straights near the finish line to see who was next in front. Next was Anton, the man with the greatest race face in the business. But there was some kind of race yesterday so when he hit something on the first part of the singletrack I could pass in a pretty aggressive way. A bit farther along when the long grusväg part started he passed me again but I was not ready to give up. So I tried to sit på rulle and on the straight after the mud puddle I attacked and got ahead. I just kept consistent and the more I looked back the more farther ahead I was getting. Good good.

So then in front of me I could see an MCK jersey and this felt like a repeat of last week with Sven. So I thought I would try again because with every straight I was gaining a little bit. Peter could see me coming at the parts where the course turned back on itself and I could see that he was getting a bit slow. Maybe this could work. Time again for a super last lap. By the end of the long straight he was less than 20 m ahead and I did my best to fly through the grass and over to the tree section. The way out of that was rough so I couldn't really get the attack I wanted but at the finish line I had closed the gap to around 5 m. Almost.

If I can keep up this steady pace for 40 minutes I think the real races will be pretty nice.