Lake Perris 2017

Lake Perris, the first high school race of the year and my first high school race ever. I was so excited for this race because I had been training really hard for it and both of my coaches were saying that I had a very good chance to win this race. One of the bummers of racing freshman is you really don't know who you are going to be racing so it is harder to prepare.

Leading up to the race, the whole week before I was eating as healthy as possible and every night before school I would spend 45 minutes cutting fruits and vegetables for the next day. Every day I brought a salad, carrots, cucumber, snap peas, an apple, and a peach. It was kind of painful to watch everyone eat whatever they wanted when I was eating salad, fruit, and vegetables, but that is part of being disciplined and wanting to win. I also was taking the Ryno Power supplements and taking their protein as well which I think really helped in the race.

On Wednesday I got on my bike to do intervals with Jason Ranoa and my bottom bracket was creaking so I showed Jason. He said that I would need a new bottom bracket when my dad came home on Friday. So we did the intervals and when we were abut halfway done I came around a corner to find my brother laying on the ground off his bike. It was kind of startling because in the past there had been people getting concussions in that area doing the same thing. Lucky his helmet took all the blow and he was fine which was a relief being the first high school race was in less than a week.

On the Thursday before my race, I was on my way home from my ride and I realized that my bike wouldn't shift into the 5th gear. Since my dad (bike mechanic) didn't come home till the next day I had to wait until he got home to fix my bike.

The Friday before the race I didn't have a ride on my schedule so I got to sleep in because we didn't have school. I washed my bike so my dad could work on it later. After I was done my dad took a look at my

bottom bracket and when he took out the crank arm off there was so much sand in there from pre-riding Lake Perris the previous weekend. So we took q-tips and cleaned it and eventfully got all the sand out. After that he put the crank back on he fixed the shifting problem and all was good.

The day before the race I woke up at around 8 and ate breakfast. After that I put my road bike on the trainer and started my 45 minutes cruise. With about 5 minutes left in my ride, I got off the trainer and road around the block a couple times until my ride was over. After my ride was over I packed for the weekend and we left for Perris in the motorhome. It takes about 30 minutes to get to Perris from where we live. Once we got there we unpacked the motorhome and had about 2 hours before the Mesa team potluck. After the potluck, the head coach told everyone where everything was and then one of the moms passed out the team T-shirts and jackets. Then for the rest of the night, I sat around and did nothing until I went to bed.

The morning of the race I woke up at 6:30 am and had a bowl of oatmeal and at around 6:45 am I had an egg burrito. At about 8 am I started to get ready to go to the pits to warm up. At 8:30 I was on my road bike on the trainer warming up for about 20 minutes. By then it was 8:50 and I had ten minutes to do any other last minute things. At 9 am I went to staging.  I was the second group staged. 'A' conference went off at 9:15, 'B' at 9:20 and 'C' at 9:25 but they didn't just say go. They had a motorcycle start us and then stop us again and then they said: "GO!" Since we were freshmen there were no call-ups so the did the UNO card and if the last number on your number plate matched the UNO card then you were called up first. They drew 2 numbers, one and zero and the last number on my plate happened to be a zero because my number was 2020 which is the year I graduate high school and that was at random. So since I was in the front I didn't have to work through any traffic to get to the front. When they said go the second time when there was no moto surprisingly they didn't go out like a rocket-ship like I was expecting. They took off really slow actually and I was in the lead and I didn't want to because I wanted to draft. Then eventually a couple people caught up and I got on their wheel. The kid that took the lead was riding for Great Oak High School and right behind him, there were 2 kids from Redlands and then me. When we were nearing the top of the climb made my attack to get into the downhill first. The 2 Redlands kids had the same idea so I crept up behind them and passed them and before they could react I was too far away to catch before the downhill. When I attacked I was able to get passed the Great Oak kid that had pushed wind for that whole first part of the race. The one Redlands kid was able to stay with me the whole time and every time I slowed down to let him in the front so I didn't have to push wind he wouldn't pass. I went all the way to right before the feed-zone in the lead and then I slowed down again to try to get him to pass and he sprinted by me too fast for me to be able to stay with him so he managed to get a large gap. Then the other Redlands kid and a different

Great Oak kid caught me and I fended them off for the whole lap. When we started to go up the hill I looked to see how far up the leader was and he was about half way up and we were at the bottom and that is when I realized that it was a fight for second place. I made a little gap between me and the other 2 kids so that when we came into the finishing shoot it was so close of a sprint. I managed to fend them off and finish second place in the first SoCal high school race of 2017. Just to put into perspective how hard I was working, after the race as soon as I stopped I felt like I had to throw up. So I went around the corner and saw my breakfast again except this time it didn't taste so good.


And a big shout out to all my sponsors who make this possible: ESI Grips, Kenda tires, Box shifters, Ridefast, SoCal Endurance, Ellsworth Bikes, Ryno Power and Dovetail Coaching.