The Life Of A Go Get Her

So the first race in the big leagues didn't work out exactly as planned. Small setbacks throughout the week topped with a little mechanical trouble on game day made the finish less than ideal. Still a great success in terms of training and getting the first one out of the way. Chances are this will be my one drop in points for the year, so in itself not a huge deal. This is by far the hardest part of the pre race week. Rest. here you are in the sun for a change with mountains in every direction and the only thing you can do is sit around and wait for the gun to go off. It's like making a starving man watch you eat a sandwich. It's all worth it; or so they tell me. Race day itself was kind of a blur. after another 4 hr. night I had plenty of time to stew around the hotel and wait for my 8:00 am pick up. By the time we made it to the course the temps were already pushing triple digits. Sitting in the back of the car and taking shots of H2O sounded good to me. A five minute spin in the sun made for adequate warm up and it was off to staging to join my fellow hundred head cases. Things shot into the single track 200 m. in and after that passing was a novelty no one was wiling to allow. This caused a certain conflict in my negative splits race strategy, but sometimes the course plays you, not the other way around. I compromised and gave it a bit of gas just to make sure I made the tail end of the front train. Things were pretty mellow from there. My brain settled on a race song to pace my breathing and everyone up front seemed content to take a controlled approach to that first ten of forty miles. around the last couple climbs people started to string out and it was time to start biding time. I just put it in cruse control and readied myself for a long hot day in the desert. Well, the bike gods didn't like that idea. Snap went the bolt in my seat clamp. Before I knew what was happening I was riding around standing up on what must have looked like some over sized trials bike. After trying my best to limit the losses I found a generous DNFer who had the heart to let me take his clamp, but it never quite held the post up long enough to get any sort of comeback going. And so on and so forth. Que Sera, Sera. All in all, not a bad spring break, on and off the bike. Time to get fast now.