It felt good to be back at Vail again. My home corse and a place I know well, so well I didn't have to pre-ride to know the course. I was told roughly where it went and I was good to go. The day prior to this race I was out at Bonelli Park racing one of the Golden State series races. You can go check that blog out for the full race report.
It's the morning of the race and I got up at about 7:00 anxus to get on the road to Vail. I did all of my last minute checks to be sure I had everything prepped and ready to go for the race to come. We left for Vail a little after 9:00 and got there at 9:30. I brought all my stuff to the pit zone and sat down with a water in my hand and began the longest 2 hours of my life. Sitting doing nothing while watching my teammates race is so difficult and every time I would get up to do something and someone would sit me back down and go do it for me. This just made sitting there harder and more boring. It's Finally 12:15 and it was time it get ready to warm up. I took a different approach to my warm-up then I usually would. Instead of doing hard efforts to get the legs warmed up like I did at Keysville I decided to do a longer tempo warm-up. At Keysville it was also a double weekend as well so I learned what I could do to better my performance. I also warmed up with an ice vest on to keep me cool while I was warming up.
The warm up was over and we were ready to stage and once again conference B (my conference) went off last. Meaning that I would have to fight threw and try to pass all of the slower riders that I would soon catch. We are staged now and the group before mine goes and after they get moving all I see is dust and when it settled they were gone. Go! My group is off and I'm slightly ahead and looking back to see if any one wanted to pass me because I didn't want to lead. And sure enough once they were clipped in and ready to go they started to pass me. I only let Blake, the series leader and one other person pass me before I jumped into a draft. Getting ready to go in to the first single track I was fighting with one other rider for the second place spot into the single track. I kept calling out my passes and trying to get by but he kept closing the door. So finally I decide not to call it out and just before we entered I passed him on the left side and got my bars just in front enough to get by. Now my focuse was to stay with Blake as long as I could. I knew that all I had to do was stay with his initial attack and I could hold his tempo. I was about 30 seconds back on him when we came threw the finish on the first lap.
I knew I wouldn't be able to stay with Blake for long before the race started so my goal was to stay with him as long as I could in an effort to try to drop the other riders in our group. Now I had to setal into a good pace so no one in my category could catch me. I was all by my self, no one to chase and no one to work with. Everyone was to far away witch is a good thing but hard and you have to be mentally in the game. At the same time I was catching the slower riders in the other groups causing a lot of traffic on the trails. All I had to do was work threw the traffic better that the other riders and I would game time on them. The second lap was over and the gap the the leader was a bit bigger and the gap behind me a bit smaller.
The third lap was the hardest of them all, not because I had been out there for a while but because there was none around me that I could work with and it was mentally difficult. I started to her my dad say the times to the group behind me and the gap was closing. I knew I needed to get my hed in the game if I was going to stay away from a group of four guys. It was the last small section of the lap and my dad said they were 10 seconds back and so I put the petals down and said to myself I wouldn't let them catch me. I was able to hold my gap to the finish line and came away with a 2nd place.
Thanks to all of my sponsors who make this double weekend of racing is possible. Ellsworth bikes, Rudy Project, Ftech cycling, Kenda tires, ESI grips, Scicon, gup industries, Ryno power, Ridefast, Sidi and ASG sports.
No comments:
Post a Comment