OMG that hurt SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO bad. Maybe it's cuz I made the mistake of holding on to Georgia Gould's wheel through the start lap loop and practically blew; but didn't thank god. Then right as I was really starting to lose hold of her rippen fast pace, I came around a left hand 180 turn and ate it hard on the pavement.......right on my still slightly healing left hand. Oh Yikes!! All was well and my hand was ok and no one passed me right away. But since I lost all my momentum in the crash and took a bit to get started again I ended up going back from top 5 to to like 16th or something nuts like that. This stuff happens so it was then time to get my places back as best I could throughout the next 38 minutes. Dang it, that sucks!
I found myself repeating time and time again under my breathe "oh my god - oh my god" because the pace that I had to set to get into 12th was unbelievable on the soft lumpy grass that the course was mostly made up of. It was likened to riding on a down comforter which I thought was pretty funny and darn accurate too.
There was one set of smoken fast barriers (left to right: Barb, moi, Shannon) and everything was dry dry dry and hot even at 7:30pm.
So I worked bloody hard to get in back up to 12th. Wow, lotta hard work with only minimal results from my own efforts. Better luck next time. Or better yet - don't freakin crash dum dum.
DJ and Quentin of Over the Edge Sports showed up.
Got to watch Lance Armstrong chase the Elite Men around the park while I was warming down. The poor Cannondale boys had to help me set up the trainer. I was pretty out of it by then and wouldn't have been able to screw a light bulb in if I had wanted too.
The Elite Men were too fast to get a picture of
Afterwards there were so many spectators and people there - some 15,000 was the word who had gotten bused in, driven, taken taxi's from the strip that we hung out in the parking lot at the venue so we didn't have to hang in the car in the other parking lot called the street.
Lots of double decker buses took people to the venue
Which made for tons of people yelling at us during the race.
We finally left at around 11pm from the venue and after dropping some folks off on the strip we didn't get back to the hotel until 12:30 am. And that is when the real work began.........trying to find the energy to disassemble and pack our bikes, shower and make something to eat. I got to bed at 3am.
Off to WI tomorrow for some UCI races taking place this weekend.
2 comments:
There are some more pictures of you on cycling news. They mislabeled one of you.
ks- i thought that was you that went down. way to rally back!!!! you're a stud. nice job in WI this weekend too!
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