Use the force, Luke!

Well, I hit my second off road race of the year. Unfortunately, I'm in that land of single-speeders racing against geared bikes. The start was a long road ride and I forget that I have to lose some time there, otherwise I blow myself up spinning at 150rpms trying to keep up with the pack. I felt like crap for the first half of the race because I did it again. It took me about 40 minutes to start getting any kind of rythym going. I was catching people and riding thru them, but it felt slow. Then all of a sudden, I felt the body click into gear. Hard up over the climbs and ease off to regain myself when it flattened out and build the pace back up. Yeah, this is what it is supposed to feel like. I started zipping through the corners only touching the rear brake to kick the bike around when it needed it. I was feeling better and after the second time thru the pine section at the top, we hit the big descent of the day. Last year, my forearms, back and legs were a mess as I tiptoed down the drops and made sure I didn't hit the rocks or anything that could've ended my day or caused a flat. This time, something was very different. I saw the line. Nothing else. It was almost like it screamed at me "THIS WAY, OVER HERE'. I didn't see where not to go. I felt like Luke Skywalker streaking down the trench on the Death Star(They just ran every Star Wars movie on SpikeTV last week). Let go, Luke. Use the force. I didn't notice anything around me. The trees, the stream, the big rocks off the trail, none of it registered with me. I just saw the line and was bombing down the hill. The bike didn't even seem to be bouncing hard. I stayed light on the bike, relaxed hands, no brakes with the exception of the occasion spike on the rear to help steer the bike. I came up to the quick right into the rocky stream, slid the bike into the sharp turn and dropped down in without thinking. The bike was moving through everything. I was floating and it was a very damn fast float. In the pine section at the top, I was able to see that there were no riders for as much as a minute ahead of me. Blasting out onto the fire road at the bottom I was greeted with the site of about 8 or 9 riders just seconds ahead of me. By the top of the short climb up the rocky road, I was past all of them. At the finish, I even outsprinted a couple riders on geared bikes. I got the jump on them out of the final drop and gunned it in from there. In the end, I wound up finishing 7th in my race. Not a bad result considering I had to fight thru alot of sport and beginnger riders at the start who had the gears to pass me early on. A bit clearer thinking at the start and checking my chain tension which resulted in throwing the chain twice at bad moments of the race and I would have probably been 3 or 4 minutes faster and 3 or 4 places higher up. I've got a couple weeks to clean the bike and light sabre now. This result was encouraging since I was considering giving in to the dark side and getting a geared bike. The next race is coming in early May and I'll be there at the front end of it.