I'd never won a thing in my life, let alone raced XCC (Criterium), but there I was taking out first place in a series of 3 races, awesome!

XCC's are short (8 minutes in this case) sprint races, and being a Solo 24 guy, far from what I excel at. My sponsor (Onya Bike Belco) was running the event, and to be on the safe side of not finishing dead last in my category and embarrassing them, I chose C grade (there's A,B,C and D).

After all I'd never done one of these, a rival friend of mine that I know is faster than me was going in B grade, so I figured, C was for me... I was wrong, I should have gone in B, but winning all three races in C grade was a huge confidence booster! I was so happy I couldn't go to sleep that night just thinking about it!

Wow. I even got prize money and schwag and all... Woohoo! :D

The top 5 from each grade then got to do a handicapped shoot out for a overall final race; the girls went first, then a 48 second gap to the juniors, then a 20 second wait, then start D grade, 10 seconds wait, then we go, and B and A went behind us with 10 second handicap gaps each.
Amazingly I passed everyone that had started ahead of me, bar the girls that had been given a 1:18 head start on me, and was in 3rd place, coming into the home straight the winner of A grade, and the strongest rider in the event, came around onto my wheel, with 50m to the finish line I dug deep and tried to hold him off, he was too strong though and got me by half a bike length, leaving me in 4th for the last race of the day.

It was an awesome day out, we were there for 5 or 6 hours, the kids had a ball riding around and the BBQ was awesome. Props to CORC, Russ Baker and Onya for putting the day on. It was the first time they had run an XCC "day" with multiple races over the day, and I hope there will be more!