Life in the fast lane

Holy smokes, life is going by REALLY fast!  Can you believe I only have 100+a handful of days until the wedding!  People have asked me if I'm stressed yet, I say no, what is there to be stressed about?  I just hope everything falls into place! 
Recently things/life/riding/racing have been going pretty well.  We had a couple weeks of nothing but sunshine and I was able to get in some awesome riding on both my road bike and mountain bike!  I have been on some pretty epic mountain bike rides and it's been fanfreakin' tastic.  You can check me out on Strava to admire my rides. 

Jess rocking the climb...every lap.
 I'm suffering behind

Way back in the middle of May was the Mutual of Enumclaw (MOE) Stage Race and when I look back at it, I can't be all that upset with my performance (just my results).  The race starts out with a 10k TT, I love it because it's short.  My goal was to improve my time from last year, and I did, so I should be happy right?  I improved my time by 40seconds, that's pretty good.  It put me at 19th place though.  My teammate Jess won the TT, so she was in the leaders jersey for the crit!  My job was to try to get as many of the time bonus's as I could, and oh yea...try to win.  At the begining of the race I sort of played some idiotic moves and nearly fried myself and ended up being way too freakin' tired to go for the first time bonus prime, but Jess ended up getting 2nd for it.  So I sat in as much as possible after that, and when the 2nd time bonus prime came around I played it MUCH smarter, until the last corner.  I was sitting just behind a gal in 2nd place thinking "Man I can try to take her for this time bonus".  One of my teammates was on the last corner and yelled "get on her wheel" so I got motivated and acted as the CAT4 racer and pedaled too early, clipped my pedal on the ground and performed some fancy moves to stay upright, didn't get to sprint, but won a 2 second time bonus...OH YEA!  I finished with the pack...maybe in 10th?  Moving me up to 16th in the GC



Another lap...miserable weather.

Looking back on the race I am finally seeing how much better I am at staying near the front and playing it somewhat aggressively, and not just sitting in.  Being scared doesn't get you anywhere, and I am finally figuring that out.  I also am learning that being in/near the front, is SO much better than having 20 of my closet friends surrounding me as I/we corner at 23 MPH.   I am also learning it's all about positioning to finish well.  If you want to finish well, position yourself to finish well.  Position yourself BEFORE the last lap and then hold your ground!!!

Riding through the master mens field

After such a lovely warm day on Saturday, the weather decided it needed to go back to it's normal Enumclaw weather and on Sunday it poured...all...day...long.  The weather was miserable and I didn't want to race.  Since it has officially almost been a month since this race and I am now finally finishing this blog post, I don't want to go into details, and you don't really care either.  The 60 mile race went something like this: I was having a great race, climbing strong, working hard staying with the leaders.  SO, after working realllly hard for basically the whole race and feeling pretty good about my performance, I pull the group (of...5 riders) to the final climb, and just as we start to climb I shift down to my small ring, and guess what happens.  My chain dropped to the inside and wouldn't get back on.  So I pulled over to put it back on and couldn't get the damn freakin' chain on!  It took me about 3-4 minutes of fiddling with it to get it on, and I lost a lot of time and a lost of positions.  I did however, remain quite calm.  I'm proud of myself for not freakin' out and finishing the race.  I am pretty sure I could have finished with the top 3 leaders, which would have put me in the top 4.  OH WELL!  You can't change things, and I can be proud of my performance.  So I am! 

Enumclaw pretty much wraps up my road racing for the season, it's time to get on my mountain bike and race it!  I can't wait for some dry warm weather and some mountain biking adventures!

Lets thank Kevin Tu (one of my teammates husband) for all of his wonderful pictures.  He comes and supports us at all the races Carly does and he takes pictures while he is at it.  Such a fantastic husband! 

Tah Tah For Now!

My solo finish home.  That's a sad faceunder the helmet.