Love Me, Love Me Not

My bike loves me, my bike loves me not. That was pretty much my racing story last week. In all fairness, is wasn't my bikes fault, just me having my usual problems and feeling icky. I did 4 races and they went good, bad, good, bad, exactly in that order.

Monday night I raced the short track MTB at PIR (good race #1) and had my best short track races this season (no flats) and the course was awesome. Okay, I actually only did 3 of the short track races, and I flatted on one and felt terrible on the other so I was really excited that everything came together for the final race. I did manage to crash on the first lap coming off the gravel pile and had to make up places, it was good motivation.

Wednesday night I raced the CMG crit (bad, bad race #1). My tactic the week before was to go hard from the start to string things out. Well, I did this again and it backfired on me. I actually wore myself out so much that when an attack went off 1/2 way through the race I got dropped from our lead group. I managed to come in off the back of the lead group, by myself, and totally disappointed in the fact that I totally sucked!

Thursday was velodrome night (good race #2) and I was excited to again try my hand at the Madison and then we were going to do a points race. I got paired with a more experienced rider for the Madison and after botching the first two exchanges managed to not completely suck for the rest of the 15 minute race. It was a lot of fun, but I was so tired that I really didn't know how I was going to do a points race. Luckily the points race was only 20 laps. At the first sprint I took some points and kept going and got a good gap on the field. I was really excited when Andrea (my fearless 6 Day diva) bridged up to me and we proceeded to work together and LAPPED THE FIELD. Lapping the field was a goal of mine at some point this season, so it was great to do it with Andrea. She beat me in the sprint, she is sprinting really well. We finished 1st and 2nd, it was great.

My bad, bad race #2 just happened to be the State Championship Time Trial. The thing that really sucked was that physically my body was toast, which meant that mentally I couldn't push myself. I tried. I pretty much realized in the first 10k of 40k that I was not going to have a good race, or even be able to race, and decided to roll it and just finish. The problem is that a) I still had 30k to ride and b) the last 20k is into a nasty headwind. I really wanted to cry and stop, but that was not an option since there was no where to go but back to the start/finish where the car was parked. I felt terrible, my time was 4 minutes slower than last year, and I was DFL.

I think I am going to go back to knitting as a past-time. Of course, I would probably find some way to screw that up as well.