Vail Lake #2 HS

The third weekend in a row out at Vail Lake and looking forward to a different venue in a few weeks. This weekend though it was a lot hotter and dustier than the previous weekends which means a different type of preparation consisting of a lot of water. My family wasn’t able to camp this weekend due to my dad being at work so I had to drive from home the day of the race. Luckily I live only 20 minutes from Vail so I didn’t have to get up too early in the morning, but I still had to do all the preparation the night before. When I woke up in the morning I was feeling sick so I was a little nervous for my race later in the day. I got to the race venue in the morning and found me a chair and sat there with my water in hand for several hours in the team pit watching my teammates race the whole morning waiting for my race. At about 12 I started getting all my feed bottles with Physiophix to the feed zone and went the the car to get my gear all together. At about 12:45 I started my warm up which I did on the dirt rather than the stationary trainer which is different than what I usually do. By the time I was done with my warmup it was time to get set up in staging. I was the 8th call up and lined up on the second row.

 Go! The race was on and we were charging towards the first single track all together. We got threw there and up the next climb all together and by half way through the first lap I was surprised to see that majority of the group was still all together. The whole race, people were fighting for position boxing each other out getting aggressive trying not to go down. Going by on the second lap I grabbed my feed bottle but missed my bottle I was supposed to dump on myself. I looked back and there was still a lot of guys behind me but I knew going into the first single track that there was going to be an attack that would break us up. I knew I was too far back in the group to be able to react and I knew I was but it was too late for me to move up in the group. Sure enough the attack went and I was too far back behind a couple people that didn’t even try to go with the attack and I had to fight around them and try to catch a couple other of the stragglers to work with them to catch back up to the lead group. I cought a few of them and we worked together but never cought the lead group. The rest of the lap the three of us worked together to keep the people behind us there and trying to gain on the people in front of us.

At the start of the next lap we were all hurting and trying to stay with it to not get cought. Nothing exciting happened that lap exept a lot of pain. The last lap on the other hand was really tough and full of attacks from every person all trying to get that little edge to get away. Every little attack, every climb was excruciating and it was all I could do to stay with the other rider. I got through a couple of the tough pitches and headed towards the last few climbs o the course. At the climb before Marine Core hill I was infront and stayed infront until we got to the top of Marine Core where he passed me really quick before going into the final decent. He got a little bit of a gap on the decent and by the time we got to the finishing stretch he was just a little too far for me to sprint past. I ended the day in eighth place which I was happy with due to not feeling good that morning.