Never knew four minutes could hurt so darn much. Nothing like a 1.2km hill climb to blast out every last corner of your lungs and make your legs burn. Starting with three up, I was paired up with Synergy's powerhouse Steph Rhoorda and BiciSport's time trialist Julie Beveridge. We started off relatively slow, knowing that you had to pace yourself well for this climb. I pulled out into the lead and set what I though was a pretty good pace. Then in the second of seven corners, Julie flew by my and put a good ten meters on me. I could hear Steph breathing hard behind, so I pushed the pace a little harder to try to keep the gap to a minimum. Slowly I felt Steph fall off, but I wasn't making any time into Julie. Coming into the last corner, I finally felt that I was starting to make small gains, so I popped it down one more gear, stood up and hammered up the last incline. I managed to pass Julie in the last corner and put almost 9 seconds on her. I have to honestly say, it wasn't really that fun, my teeth even hurt from breathing so hard.....but it did feel good to blast out the system. My time of 4 minutes 7 seconds was so close to the mens winning time of 3 minutes 19.....watch out Zack Bell, you're all mine next year.....hehe, only have to increase my wattage by at least 300 watts.
The second day of the Tour de Bowness, holiday monday, was a road crit on the lovely roads of Bowness encircling Bow Cycle. Great spectator turn out, lots of great riders, good festivities and great weather. Unfortunately there was a relatively small womens field, maybe 12 racers in the A and B combined. Quickly the race split into the A and B cats, we had a small pack of five girls in the A. Through out the entire race we stayed together, with lots of little attacks and sprints for the preems. I had to work really hard a couple of times to catch back onto the group, I'm not used to the really short, explosive attacks, takes me a little while to get up to speed. With some really fast and some really rough corners, the women's race managed to stay accident free...not so with the all of the men's cats. In the final sprint, I needed about ten more meters to make my mark, but I ended up in fourth place in the crit, and second place in the omnimum for the weekend.
After a couple of easy recovery days, my parents and I started the long drive south to Snowmass, CO. After about 20 hours of driving, made it safely. Pre-road the course yesterday, super long and really fun, lots of climbing, but also lots of single track and really great downhilling. It's gonna hurt tomorrow...yippee.
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