Canton Cup Race Report aka It's Slower to BunnyHop Barriers

Hey I'm just gonna stretch over here before we get staged. Oh what's that...there is no staging...it's classic, "First to the line gets front row."? Awesome... Good news was, there was plenty of pavement so there were only two rows of racers. Bad news was, some fool decided to salmon down to the start with about a minute before the whistle and literally pull in right in front of me. Dude. Seriously? Butttt.....To his credit he did scootch over a bit...a bit.

Any way.

Whistle blows and I try and grab a line on the outside right and move up some places, only to get squeezed in on the second turn.

I quickly settled into a group with some guys I recognized from the MRCC race and felt good about hanging in the middle of this pack.
Now, the saving grace of the Canton course is the three barriers, run-up and bunny-hop log. There's a couple other very short interesting technical sections, but it's mostly an open course. AKA 'Toby's gonna get spanked' course.
So of course I was gonna try and take advantage of the technical sections and do things like bunny-hop the low barriers, and pass people who dismounted to get over the 'log' (branch).
But, the tricky thing about the low barriers was that you could carry plenty of speed into them, but had to make a hard right hand turn directly after them.

Any way. What ever it was, I decided that on the second lap, in the middle of a pack of 10, I would clear the second barrier while landing with my wheel sideways and proceed to eat it into a bush while going ass over teakettle (read endo).

Sooooo that was the end of riding with that group. I kept going...kind of. And it turned out that Matt Mitchell fell on a loose corner and also lost the group. So we rode 'together' for the rest of the race. Him dusting me on the power/open sections, and me feebly regaining ground on the tech stuff...just like last time! And of course the first time I did actually make it up to him, he generously pulled over to let me take a long pull around the running track, only to pass and dust me once we got over the high/fast barriers. Awesome. Glad I agreed to that.

From there I time trialed it in for a 17th/29.

And the morale of the story is that it's only faster to bunnyhop barriers if you don't end up on your ass while doing so. GTK