It's called Hell of North for a reason

I had a good plan, in theory. I was trying to decide if I should do the Hell of the North race as a Cat 5 or give Masters a try. To make the choice easy I found out I could both with the second race being 50% off. No problem it’s only 65 miles.

The Cat 5 race was first and I saw Utrider at the start, that‘s the last time I saw him. I decided to sit in the middle of pack and just take it easy after all after the 5 races I still had 35 miles of racing to do. Oh and did I mention that they put fresh gravel on the backside of the course? After lap 1 the field had split apart and I decided to stay with the slower group rather then push it and try and keep on the back of the 1’st pack. After 2 laps I found myself pretty much alone after losing most of the 2nd back on the dirt. As I came into the dirt on the backside on lap three, 4 guys had broken off the slow pack and caught me. I decided to try and stay with this group. We pacelined lap 4 and on lap 5 it was down to 4 of us. I decided to pull back a little since I still had a whole race to do after this and let two of the guys fight for position going into the dirt. They took turns attacking each other and it became apparent to me that neither was in a position to pull away, so I decided to take the sprint. Unfortunately, this caused me to pull a muscle in my leg.

I quickly went back to the car, changed numbers got a new bottle, ate a Powerbar and took a Clifshot and got back to the start in time for the masters race. It was a much smaller field and I was excited to be riding with an experienced field. The start was good I stayed in the back though because I wasn’t sure if my leg would give me a problem. After about 1k someone decided to pick the pace up. Wow we hadn’t even done ¼ of a lap and I was already going faster then I wanted. Just after the bridge the pace picked up even more and I got tossed like dirty bathwater. I decided to time-trial it and see how many laps I could do. After getting passed by the 45+ field toward the end of lap 2 I did the calculations in my head and figured this was going to take me into the start time of the 1-2 race and I should just stop while I was just a little behind. Looking back I should have just picked one category (masters).