I'm suffering from a serious CX hangover, so I'll be brief (considering I'm recounting two races), but I always find it useful to rehash what I learned in a 'cross race, and maybe someone else can learn from it too.
Did both days in the 3's at Green Mountain CX this weekend. If you've never raced this, you should at some point: it's a beautiful venue. There's also lots of up, but it's also counterbalanced by stretches of sweeping (fast) downhill turns, and they put together two nicely different courses for each day (despite using many of the same elements).
Day 1: Uphill start
Got a good start, despite my 3rd-to-last row position, then made good headway moving up on the long uphill drag. I could tell I was going well, as the numbers around me were lower than mine, and I could see Todd Prekaski ahead. I was a little cautious on the downhills, but mostly because I didn't want to roll into the back of anyone. Luckily, the wheels in the 3s are more predictable than the 4s, and I was able to go pretty fast.
Settled into a nice group with Dan Donovan (ECV), and a couple of other guys. Todd joined us on lap 2 - he'd crashed - and we set about trying to catch the group in front of us. This group contained a national champion's jersey. Admittedly, it was the girls under 17 national champ (Emma White is racing with the men's 3s this year), but she's a damn good racer. Not long after catching Emma and Brian Zierhof (Stage 1) on the long climb, I had some trouble getting back to the big ring and got gapped from my group. I spent the next half lap burying myself to get back on, but couldn't attach. In the process, I gassed myself pretty well and got caught by two guys from Rensalear the final time up the long hill. I managed to latch onto the back of them, but screwed up my remount the last time through the barriers, landing on my balls. In some degree of pain, I regathered myself and finished a couple of seconds behind the Rensalear kids in 51st (9 better than the race predictor, so a victory)
Good: catching and gapping people in the turns, rode a solid race, stayed in a group
Bad: Needed to meter effort better after missing the big ring shift, bad remount
Day 2: Downhill start
This course started downhill into a series of wide sweeping turns in rolling field. And I was in the second-to-last row. Consequently, things were kind of crazy at the start and didn't string out. I started to get antsy at not finding places to move up and put myself into places that were a little risky. This cost me when, in the first series of downhill off cambers, touched my front wheel to a guy's back wheel and ended up shooting through the tape, into the weeds. I want to say he took an interesting line choice or something like that, but I think it was mostly my fault. Anyway, by the time I got going again, I was DFL.
Taking a lesson from the day before, I did not panic, and kept a steady effort to pick off a good number of people over the rest of the race. In particular, I'd noticed in the masters races that on the uphill turn right after the start/finish, many of the leaders were going wide around the turn. This longer line avoided a steep, bumpy little patch that was kicking my ass the day before. So I tried the wider line and found myself passing someone (sometimes several people) almost every time around that turn. Yay old man wisdom!
Anyway, after my mistake on lap 1, I felt like I rode a solid race and ended up still beating the race predictor by 3 spots (54th). So, minor victory.
Good: Didn't panic after crashing & metered effort to get back in the race. Watched other (better) racers and learned from it.
Bad: Forced things too much at the start and it cost me.