High Altitude Short Track

After I realized I had just pulled a total rookie move by thinking my 1:15 race started at 2:00 (yeah, that was smart), I managed to actually get in a pretty good warm-up. A little easy spinning and lots of hard sprinting to get the juices flowing in my legs...thank goodness for the morning coffee ride, I was actually feeling not too bad.

This short track course was one of the most difficult that I've seen, with lots of climbing. I had a great start off the gun and pulled in close behind Georgia for the first lap. By the second lap she had started to gap me and that's were I made my next rookie move. I was feeling pretty good, and knowing I was just on the rivet I decided to try to stay with her. Katerina passed me and I pushed on to grab her wheel. Being that the course is at about 7200 ft, you sometimes forget that your limit comes a little faster then normal and once you've blown your rivet, it's tough to recover... I think I got carried away and blew past my limit faster and harder then when I eat mint chocolate chip ice cream in a chocolate dipped waffle cone...mmmmm....yup, there was no coming back from that one.

For a couple of laps I kept trying to push through, but I couldn 't seem to get enough air down my throat...and believe me, it wasn't pretty. After being passed and dropped by so many girls I finally smartened up and backed off a little to let my lungs and legs recover. I spent another lap slowing my breathing back to normal, letting my lungs fill back up with an adequate amount of O2 and settling back into a maintainable rythm. For the last three laps I was able to pull my pace back up and pick off two girls to finish in 9th place. Definitely not the outcomes that I was planning this weekend, but a very good lesson was learnt the very hard way..I've still got a headache from breathing so hard.

Dallas raced his second ST race after the my race, and with a back row call up he had his work cut out for him...and man, it was definitely a good work out.

After cooling down, we performed the ole shower in the sink trick and hit the road north. After a couple hours of driving, we found a nice noisy campground in Idaho Falls...that had real showers. Getting up early in the morning, we drove into Helena and with "Montana Singletrack" map book in hand, found some really, really wicked singletrack along Helena Ridge. Definitely worth checking out...you'll probably even find some of the white paint from my Trek frame smeared across a rock (dammit)..nothing a couple bandaids won't fix :(

Huge thanks to Dusty, Zack, Laura and Shep from Trek for helping out with feeding and maintence this past weekend...