Dealer Camp Dirt Gran Prix Short Track - Park City, UT

Women's Podium:  moi, Katerina, Chloe

As if 4 races in 8 days in 3 different states weren’t crazy enough there was one last race I wanted to hit.  It was a 30min Short Track race at Dealer Camp that was taking place at Deer Valley Resort.

My thought was that if I get my act together enough and recover from Saturdays race in Montana the best possible I could maybe pull off this one last race before taking some down time.  The plan was to just wait and see how the body reacted over the few days until race day.  I know mentally I was on a high after placing 4^th at the  US Mountain Bike Short Track National Championships and then winning the first Cyclocross race of the season but I didn’t know if I had anything left after lots of car time and lots of intensity too!

Believe it or not, once Tuesday night rolled around for the 6:20pm start I was ready to go!!  What I was really excited about was that some semi foul weather had moved in bringing some sprinkles and thunder.   Plus, I love Short Track too much to miss it, especially when it’s so close and taking place where I have worked for 17 years.  And there was GREAT prize money too.  What’s not to crawl out of bed for!?

The course had a pretty good amount of climbing for a Short Track.  It started on a fire road that took you up to the top where you made some zig zag turns taking you back down and around to do it again.  It was a short 2-3 minute gut wrencher. 

Ready, set,....GO!

We got going and the group stayed surprisingly well together for the first couple laps before completely exploding into our own version of a mtb Time Trial.  When you have a Garmin (mine is an Edge 500) and you end up in a Time Trial race that you didn’t sign up for, you have nothing but data to keep you thrilled.  Up to 8 pieces of data per screen means you can have more fun reading that riding!  Perfect for a Time Trial especially if you have it set up in “Scroll” mode meaning it scrolls at your pre selected pace from screen to screen.  It even will count your laps so you don’t have to!  That is a good thing when you are dizzy and can’t even say your own name while racing.  Will the Garmin Edge 500 pedal for me too??!!  I think it’s getting there! 

With the race now a Time Trial it became a race against my own head.  I had done a lot of racing in the last 11 days and I was definitely on the edge of being fried.  I knew my fitness was still there as my legs were allowing me to move up.  But my head had moments of not wanting to push because I have been pushing my mind and body plenty recently.  I quickly squashed those thoughts as they entered my head and planted dollar signs in their place.  Nothing like that to make you roll across the line in 2^nd!!  Pay day!

Dealer Camp was impressively large.