Hey Everyone,
Sorry I’ve been out of touch, travel and racing has been taking up a lot of time.
So, here’s what’s been happening: Countdown Begins….. 24 Hour Solo World Championships are just about 4 weeks out, so I have entered the period in my training cycle where I’m super focused on this primary goal and pretty much nothing else. This is the point in a year long training cycle to focus on every meal, every night’s sleep, every training ride to squeak the very most out of my efforts. Most of the hard work has been completed and these last four weeks are about topping off the engine before heading to Canmore.
Last weekend, I raced in the Cowbell Challenge, a 50 miler in North Carolina. This race was part of the USA Cycling Ultra Endurance series and a short distance for me to get in a good, hard training day. The course here is always tight, technical single track and this year was no different. The biggest difference in the course was the heavy rains they’d had the week leading up to the race. It made the course really slippery and treacherous. On my pre-ride on Friday, I had to work a couple sections of the course to figure them out and also made a tire change to Specialized Captains to get more traction and confidence on race day. The local dealer, Cycle Path helped me out a lot with the last minute tire change. Since this was a short race, I did not take crew, a mechanic or an extra bike. The bike was perfect, but the race was not. I had a great start in a strong pro women’s field and was in the lead, but about an hour into the race, the affects of the triple digit temps and over the top humidity started to get to me. I was feeling chilled, lightheaded and fumbly. I had to make the decision to settle into survival mode instead of race mode. Each lap I was getting iced down hydration packs, pushing fluids and endurolytes and putting ice water on my head to cool down my core temperature. It has been a cold Spring in Idaho, so I was not acclimatized to the heat in any way. I was suffering badly and wondered if I was going to be able to finish. By the last couple laps of the race, my cooling strategies seemed to be working and I started feeling like myself again and felt like I could get back into race mode. I settled for a 2nd place finish behind Carey Lowrey. Carey was up by as much as 10 minutes at one point, but I was able to pull about 4 minutes back on the last lap and get a bigger gap on third who was inching up on me. The outcome was a little disappointing, but considering that only 40 athletes out of nearly 200 finished the race, I’m happy that I was conservative and didn’t dig myself into a hole that I couldn’t get out of.
I’m home for a week, then the next race on the schedule is Marathon Nationals in Breckenridge on July 4th. In the meantime, I just finished up our local Wednesday night short track series and took the women’s overall. I finally get my name on a perpetual trophy with antlers mounted on it, only the bowling league can beat that.
Check out the video from the Cowbell Challenge.
Cheers
Reba
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIRQ2BoR_2A]
Recent Comments