You know your hurting from the altitude when your soft pedaling and your heart rate is up into the hard working zone. The start of the the cross country course is at about 8000ft, and there is a fair bit of climbing each lap. Off the start I settled into what I thought was a good hard pace, but was quickly left in the dust, literally, as I found myself in about 15th by the top of the first major climb and hurting. With decending definitely being my strong point, I was able to recover somewhat and settle in again. Each lap I started to find my groove a little more, and maybe my "slow" start was good, because I was able to pick off a number of positions.
Going into the last half of the third and last lap, I was sitting in 8th position with Luna rider Chloe Forsman and Trek rider Jenny Smith just in front of me. Up the last gradual climb, I clawed my way up to them and managed to gun it past Chloe and catch up to Jenny by the top. But I'd missed my last good chance for anymore passing. The remaining couple of klicks was predominately downhill (my forte), so I just calmly road behind Jenny waiting to see if she'd slip up or blow a corner (I mean, you can't make an aggressive pass on your own teammate). She road super cleanly to the finish and she finished 6th and I finished 7th ..awesome.
After my race, I had a quick cool down spin with Catharine who pulled off a great 3rd place in the Luna train at the front...congrats...oh yeah, I must mention the fact that she's officially been named to the Canadian team for the Olympic games!!!!!!!
Then cleaned up half assed and ran up the hill to feed and support Dallas in his first NMBS race ever!!! Racing against guys like Geoff Kabush is a whole new experience and it's tough to know what to expect. He raced hard and definitely felt the effects of the altitude...I'm super proud of him for giving it all he had today.
Just finished a nice lovely ice bath...I'm pretty cooked right now...going to rest up and try to hit the short track hard tomorrow...it's supposed to be a really tough course...yippee :)
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