Wymas In The Wild: Night Cap!!

We'd all been looking forward to this one for a while and it delivered as usual. The only downside was, if you were Cody, then you may have tried to register after the race capacity limit had been reached at 100 riders. The existence of this limit was only made known on the bikeiowa.com website late the night before and it wasn't on the flier or anything. I'd seen this one hit the 70s before but wouldn't have guessed we'd need an artificial cap. There was a waiting list to fill slots left by no-shows which helped, but there weren't enough no-shows to let Cody in.

Men 4/5 went off right before sunset and it actually wasn't too cold yet. The leg and arm warmers were about right. This one was another category-staged mass start, which is kinda poor because I'm still in my auto-demoted category-5 and I have to ride through a big chunk of the 4's to get into a comfortable position. This whole split category start thing works much better when staging is done by USA Cycling rank. Fortunately, I'm good at start sprinting and got way up there before we made it onto the main course. Several other 5's went with me and then back half of the 4's kinda balled-up in a pile behind us.

There was a nice stretch of tarmac (yes I really have been watching that much Top-Gear) to really fry your legs right after a tough climb.

Topping the big climb here. A fair amount of people were dismounting to run up it. It was pretty close to the practical limit for my gearing, especially since there was a corner at the bottom and you could only carry so much speed into it.

With a couple races in between, Corrine went out well after dark. I ate hamburgers.

Mechanic pit! We've been making sure to keep a B-bike in the pit after the Bobber's Cross ordeal. It seems to reason that if we always put one in there, then we'll never need it? It was all manner of professional here - there was even a SRAM truck doing free repairs.