I'm not sure this race deserves its own post. I showed up around 1:45, after running for three hours, with not enough food or water having been digested, or ingested. I was also dressed as a pirate, and realized quickly that it was way too warm to race in my pirate costume (with my faithful parrot - I mean, duck - pinned to my shoulder). I took pictures of the kids race, some of those kids were cute little buggers, and there were some great diggers, but the kids' race was at 2, and my race was at 2:30, so by the time I finished with taking pictures and got kitted up in a more temperature-appropriate outfit, I had three minutes to race start. Yay for no warmups!
I realized, on the start line, that I really didn't want to race my bike. I also realized, I hadn't pinned my number. But the official was very nice, and told me that since everyone else had their number, they'd be able to figure out who I was. Damn, that excuse won't work. Off we went, and my body quickly realized that I hadn't warmed up and my legs were tired. Unlike MRC (the other race where I also skipped the warmup), there weren't any sloppy corners to make up ground, Canton was dry and fast. I made two sketchy passes, got myself up to 6th, and then slowly dropped back to 8th place. Then a girl in front of me rolled her tubular, and I was back to 7th. Wheee! Two places out of the money!
And then my legs stopped working, and people were riding away from me. I didn't have any fight, nothing was happening to close the gap. I remembered Cathy before the race - "remember, its supposed to be fun". This wasn't fun. I had two options - I could drop out, or I could slow down until it was fun again. I decided that since the official had already let me race, I may as well finish. Unfortunately, at a slower speed, it wasn't that much more fun, it was just slower. I tried to think positive - "that girl who rolled her tire is going to be so psyched when she catches up!" And then I finished my four laps and I was done. And grumpy, and tired, and my body hurt, and I wanted to curl up in a little ball and go to sleep, not hang around until the end of the guys' race and do course take down. Grumble. I'm not going to do that again, no more racing unless I actually want to race. No more cross races on no warmup, either...
That might be it for CX for the year for me... West Yellowstone is around the corner, and that means SKI SEASON!!!
4 comments:
The look on your face as you passed the finish line each lap definitely said "I was running for 3 hours before this and I'm not having fun."
Nice one.
It all comes back to my ranking of D's... DFL>DNS>DSQ>DNF. In other words, I need a darn good reason to drop out of a race once I've started, and I guess "not having fun" wasn't a good enough reason.
Cmon Alex, why run 3hrs and race CX in the same day? Isn't a cross race hard enough? At least if you have to, do the running after the race so you can go really slow!
Yes, cross is hard enough. I guess the problem is that the race is at the end of the day already, so there isn't time for a 3hr run beforehand. But I'm just justifying... I really should just choose one thing at a time.
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