NEW GLOUCESTER – Andrew Freye was happy to get a little home cooking this weekend. His last competitive race, the World Mountain Bike championships held in late August in New Zealand, didn’t afford him the same opportunity.

“I’m pretty sore,” the Winthrop native and U.S. National Team mountain biker said of his back-to-back days of racing at the 2006 Verge New England Championship Cyclo-Cross Series. “I haven’t really been doing a whole lot of training (since August). I’ve been riding my bike, having fun, but not really training to race. I’ve just been taking a physical break after a long mountain-biking season.”

The lack of training, or the fact that he had traded his fat tire bike for a pair of skinny knobbies for the weekend, didn’t hurt Freye. He finished 15th in Saturday’s Elite Class race, and put in a 23rd-place effort on Sunday to capture the Maine State Elite championship in the discipline.

He was much more excited to be racing near home, though.

“Normally I have to get up at 5 a.m. and drive for three hours to go to a race,” he said. “Last night I went home and got a home-cooked meal, slept in a nice quiet house, and it was still only a 45 minute drive to be here today.”

The Pineland campus was a hit with racers for a second day, as the fine autumn weather from Saturday carried over into Sunday. Race organizers were on hand at 6:30 a.m. to rearrange the tape fences and barriers. Sunday’s race utilized lots of new terrain and featured a long, switch-backing descent through the woods to give the cyclists a different challenge.

“Two totally different courses,” said Damien Colfer, a racer for Mechanical Services/Cycle Mania out of Portland. “Today was very fast. Yesterday was more technical, with more mud pits and natural barriers. It’s great. I’m glad they didn’t go with identical courses.”

Colfer, who finished third in the B Men category on Sunday, is in his first season racing cyclo-cross seriously, after his season as a road racer was broken up by injuries.

“Since I had such a haphazard road season, I thought I’d put in the effort and try some ‘cross,” said Colfer. “I like the atmosphere, because there are so many other things going on and so many spectators. It’s a great race for the family to come out and watch. It’s hard-hard effort, it’s all out, and it’s a lot of fun.”

With his podium finish, Colfer plans to continue racing the Series this season.

“I’ll have to go now,” he chuckled. “I’m pretty high up in the Verge standings, so I’m committed to the next six or eight races.”

Brad Perley of Kennebunkport captured the Maine State championship in the Under-19 class with a seventh-place finish. Perley, a mountain bike racer in the summer, is devoted full-time to cyclo-cross in the fall for a second year.

“As far as endurance goes, its a lot of hard, quick effort here, where in mountain biking its sustained over a long period of time,” said Perley. “As far as the pavement and the flat open sections, I’m not used to that. That’s more a road biking thing. It’s interesting to have that added in, though.”

His friend Colin Huston, also of Kennebunkport, was coming at cyclo-cross from the other end of the spectrum, having just finished his fourth season as a road racer. Huston finished 10th in the Under-19 class in only his fourth cyclo-cross race.

“I’m a road biker, so the section in the woods was a lot harder for me to do,” said Huston. “I got muddy and had a good time, though. I definitely would have liked to have had a little more mountain bike experience, but it was fun.”

There were no shakeups in the Elite class races. Tim Johnson topped Mark McCormack for a second straight day, winning by nearly a minute to take the Elite Men’s race. In another repeat of Saturday’s results, Lyne Bessette defeated Katerina Nash in the Elite Women’s class. Bessette got warmed up by participating in the B Men race right before the Elite Women race.

With nearly 700 racers between the two days, and 200-250 spectators coming out each day, the event was an overwhelming success in the eyes of race promoter and cyclist John Grenier.

“We have a reputation here at this facility as the most beautiful course that anybody has seen, but people were always dreading the difficulty of the course” said Grenier. “This year the comments are all really favorable, and people have said that they will be back next year and tell others about us.”