more races!

Cross season is so hard to stay on top of, both for blogging and, in my opinion unless you are ultra disciplined, for training. It's all race, recover, recover, (workout), recover, race, repeat.

So I've missed reporting on a few over the last few weeks.

Turkey Cross - Another one close to home, at Spadina and St Clair. Great venue for a race, there's a reservoir there, so there's an awfully big hill, and lots of challenging terrain. It was a fun course, but I made the mistake of letting the off-camber section (which was long and steep) get into my head, and it was hard to ride it with the confidence I needed. I knew what I needed to do (attack it and keep pedalling), but couldn't seem to get my body to respond, and I was all over the brakes and unclipping the uphill foot. No biggie, but the peanut gallery kept whining at me "you need to pedal the whole section!", in case I wasn't frustrated enough. Luckily, one small section does not make an entire course, and the rest of it was pretty good! Another 5th place finish for me on that weekend.

Toronto Intenational UCI Weekend -What a great weekend! We had amazing weather, and a couple of fun houseguests who were here for racing.

Saturday's course had a decent amount of climbing, an uphill run, and some really tricky ups on this berm on the far side of the course. I kept heading out to warm up, and then worry that they were staging soon, so I'd hustle back to the start corral to see that nothing was happening. In any case, I didn't have a great start, and I was at the back of the group before we hit the first corner. I ended up battling with the two juniors in the race, and managed to stick with them pretty well. I think with about 2 to go, they gapped me, and I just kinda lost motivation. Until I realized I didn't want to get lapped, which motivated me to get back to work. Unfortunately, I did get pulled because I was very close to getting lapped... and almost more unfortunately, I misheard the Commissaire since I was way past him before he said anything to me and no other finish judge or Commissaire said anything, so I didn't know that I was being pulled, and ended up riding one last lap just for the fun of it, all by myself. I was actually pretty close to quitting partway through the race - I was hurting and thought it might be safer to save the legs for Sunday, but some quick math reminded that I'd get paid just for finishing, since it was a small women's field relative to required pay-out spots. So pro, eh? 13th place.

Sunday's course felt like it had a bit more flow to it. It had this one steep drop off the dirt road on the ski hill. I balked the first time in pre-ride, but I was determined to not let it get into my head like the off-camber at Turkey Cross. I kept telling myself it was a great course, and I really liked it, and in the end, it was all true. In fact, the drop was pretty fun, and had a nice long run-out, so there were no real issues there at all. Started about the same, not very fast off the gun, and back with the same two girls as the day before. The thing I like about Day 2 of a race is that Day 1 gives you a little taste of how bad you have to hurt, so Day 2 it's like you're more ready to go there. Go there I did - I was determined to have a better race, and to really just concentrate on each section of the course as it came. No stressing about where anyone else was, or what position I was in. I ended up having my best race so far this season - I pushed hard on all the sections that suited me, and focused on cleaning the technical sections. I made up a couple of places, finishing 11th!

This season's had some ups and downs, but Rachael said it best that I'm still kicking butt and having fun!