This past weekend I headed down to Winter Park for the Colorado Crankworks and to Granby for the Mountain States Cup Sol Survivor. It was a really tough weekend of racing for my tired legs, but so many things other than racing kept me occupied all weekend that it really didn't bother me that I didn't have good performances either day.I have been logging long, hard, back-to-back days of training recently to prepare for a stage race and another 100-miler at the end of the month, so I put these races on the schedule for training purposes. You can't truly simulate back-to-back days of racing without racing, so though I knew I was already spent, I came to race anyway. Keeping in mind that I have done two, 50 mile races and a 100-miler in the last month and haven't taken a break, my expectations were adjusted accordingly ;)
The Crankworks course was a point-to-point epic. 24 miles, great singletrack, an opening 35 min. climb that almost killed me and lots of fast, technical descents. I felt great and was in 2nd place for an hour then my body simply said "enough!" and I tanked, got passed on the last few climbs and had to settle for 4th. Oh well. They had lots of free food and drinks at the end.
The next day I bucked up and went out to the Sol Survivor with even lower expectations. I had a terrible start, was 2nd to last going into the singletrack and again, the legs were hating every moment of it. I was able to make a bunch of passes on the opening climb and was hanging in around 7th or 8th place when all of the sudden a HUGE storm rolled in on the start of lap 2. Lightening directly over our heads, thunder that made your innards quake and lots of rain and hail. I went from thinking I was going to die from riding too hard to thinking I was going to die at the hands of mother nature. A few gals decided to turn around, but I kept pedaling, only to take a few minutes of rest at the very top of the climb when it started hailing. I sat in the woods for a bit, drank some water, waited for the hail to turn back to rain and kept going.
They called the race off after 2 laps (3 was the plan) and miraculously, I ended up 5th. I think it was more a race of attrition than anything....It turned out to be quite fun for me in the end. I never get to ride in the pouring rain and though I would prefer to be able to see the trail, riding down flowing streams of water turned out to be a rockin' good time. Thankfully, I was running Kenda's best all around race tires, the Karmas, and the muddy conditions didn't give me much trouble.
The best part of the trip was that I got to spend the entire weekend with one of my bestest pals from Colorado College, Heidi. She's a super-smart medical resident in Denver and she came up to Winter Park to hang out. She was such a good sport and supported me and my teammate, Andy, with waterbottles at the startline, cheers and lots of laughs. We had such a great time together all weekend, I sort of forget that I was racing.
Of course, she's sipping a Coors. We were in Colorado.
This is me, happy to have survived the morning of racing. Can you believe how many people were out there watching???
These guys are the real deal. I couldn't imagine doing a back flip on anything but a trampoline, let alone a bicycle. I guess $30,000 in prize money is pretty motivating!
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