Pigeon Lake

For all of you who are extremely attracted to the typical cyclist tanlines, beware, mine are pretty darn sexy. Forgetting to put on sunscreen when it's thirty above out works wonders in this department, kind of a little painfull though...oh well, all in the name of sexy tanlines right.

This weekend, the classic Pigeon Lake Road Race. I had some demons to conquer here. Five years ago, in this very location, I road my very first road race on my dad's ancient pink Fiori with down tube shifters. Come to think of it, this was probably my very first road ride ever....scary. And the cherry on this cake.........it rained and rained and rained and rained the whole race. For two and a half hours I struggled to stay with the pack, not too mention struggled with the concept of these tiny tires with no knobs. In the end, I managed to stick with the top pack until the last km of climb to the finish where I was completely blown off the back. I finished the race cross eyed and utterly nuked, but managed a top ten in my first road race..yippee.

This weekend, Dallas and I decided to head up the night before and camp at the Pigeon Lake provinical park. Spend a nice evening with the bird sized flies. All was well until about midnight, when the sky opened up and the angels started peeing on us. Thunder, lightning and lots of rain...great, just it's going to be just like five years ago. But come morning, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, just a really wet tent and and soggy bikes to show for the night.

After a tough week of training, and a really tough long saturday filled with MAP intervals, I had no expectations coming into my first road race of the season. With both the A and B cats combined, I think we had 30 women at most, not a big group. The pack stayed together pretty much for the entire race, a couple of attacks and counterattacks, but not much that held (it's a pretty flat course, with a head wind in every direction). Being of the full on mountain biker mentality to go faster, I tried subsequent attacks and covered every attack that I could from Natasha Kuzmak, to which my legs screamed in some crazy accent to me "WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO US?!!!!!". In the end, the group finally started to splinter, it was a seven girl sprint to the finish, and I nudged out Natasha by a half wheel length for the win. Ha, take that Pigeon Lake demons.

Dallas with his bummed knee pulled off an amazing first cat 3 race and took the win as well. Great job babe. On the way home we hit up Mickey D's, I opted for the healthy salad while Dallas went for the full on Big Mac........yuck, hehe. Great to see everyone out there this weekend.