Coming into this race I was super excited because Vail is my home course. I was ready to see everyone's true ability as a mountain bike rider and what their skill level was compared to me. I was ready to see who were the roadies of the group, who were the skilled riders and who were the all around riders. Since I ride at Vail all the time I was super confident about my abilities on the course and I hoped that I would do better than the last race. Looking back at the previous race at Lake Perris I looked at all the things that I did wrong and all the things I did right. I made sure to capitalize on what I could and make changes to my pre-race itinerary accordingly. Since I threw up after the race at Lake Perris I change up what I had for breakfast in the morning. At Perris, I had a bowl of oatmeal which seemed to be the cause, because it was too heavy so this time I just had one egg burrito and was good to go.
The morning of the race I woke up at about 6:30 and had my burrito. From there I stayed in bed until I absolutely had to get up which was around 7:45. When I got up I got my bottles and my gels for during the race ready to go. From there I got my kit on and grabbed my mountain bike and headed over to the pits where my dad had my road bike on the trainer for me to warm up. My warm up consists of a steady zone 2 and slowly rises to a zone 5 to get the blood flowing and the butterflies out of my system.
Since I had the second call-up I didn't have to be at the front of the crowd and neither did the leader. One thing I really like about this sport is the good sportsmanship so when I got to the line I was talking with the leader a little bit. When we got called up after A conference and we were waiting for the race to start I took one of my gels and gave my warm up vest to my dad. Before I knew it we had 5 seconds and, the whistle, we were off. The second high school race of the year had begun and we were on our way to the first section of the course which was the high school signal track is what everyone calls it. At the start of the race, the rider that got 5th at the last race was leading and he is like 6 feet tall and compared to me that is ginormous with me only being 5'2 so I was getting the best draft in the world. He stayed in the lead until the leader decided to make his first attack going into a climb called air force. I was the only other rider abe to stay with the leader when he attacked so when we took off the other rider couldn't keep up so we dropped them and they never caught us for the rest of the race. By this time we had already caught part of the back of A conference so there was traffic in the single track. He managed to pass a couple of slower riders from A conference right before the single track and I couldn't pass them for a little bit. By the time I did pass them the leader had about a whole football field on me so now it was time to real in that gap in. Luckily for me, he got stuck behind a slow person so it gave me time to catch up.
Right as I caught them the leader taped the slow riders tire and he crashed. I immediately capitalized on his mistake and passed both the leader who was on the ground and the slower rider. I came through the finish line on the first lap with about a minute ahead of him. As I came out of the first single track of the course and was heading towards the long fire road I realized that he had closed the gap almost all the way. So then I backed off because he was already on my wheel and there was no point in wasting energy if he was just going to draft on me. When we were going up the climb we were chilling we didn't even make an effort to pass each other until the single track was in sight. I managed to get in front of him before we started going down but I was so exhausted from the sprint I didn't have enough energy to try to pull away on the downhill. Once we got out of the single track I was trying my hardest not to let him pass me because I knew if he did then the race was going to be much more difficult. He managed to get by me on the last sustained climb and I wasn't able to stay with him. Since I knew that I wasn't going to catch the leader I focused on not letting anyone else catch me. I manage to finish second place at this race taking my second #2 placing of the year. Due to rain, they postponed the awards until the next race at Keyesville.
I would like to start out by thanking all my sponsors, ESI Grips, Kenda Tires, Box Components, Ridefast, SoCal Endurance, Ellsworth Bikes, RynoPower and Dovetail coaching.
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