Happy B'day, you Still can't climb hills!

This weekend I rolled another year older. As a coincidence it was also the start of the Winter Park Mountain bike race series.

I raced a couple of these races last year and decided this year I was going to give the entire series a try. Last year was my first mountain bike race so I entered in the beginner categories and did pretty well. My first race I finished second (with a teammate in first) and my second race I broke my chain, ran about 2 miles and finished 6th. So this year, I bumped it up to the sport class.

This year, like all the previous years, things were kicked off with a hill climb. From the base of Winter Park to the top of Mary Jane. I am no little dude, going straight up hills is a little scary for me. This is a bad thing for a Colorado racer when most of the road races during the summer are either HC, dangerous crits or a few road races.The coarse was a simple run up the service road that had obviously been repaired since the snow melt. It was in great condition, non-technical, a simple race to the top.

I thought I was being sneaky. Instead of riding my super heavy mountain bike I thought I would ride my 19 lb Ridley CX bike. I never got a chance to pre-ride the coarse but had gotten reports from other teammates. The CX bike even had lower gears for the anticipated steep sections; a 34 front ring and a 26 rear cassette. According to the information I had, I made the right bike choice.

There were 39 people at the start. When we started everything was great. I had a teammate shoot out the front and I found a pair of riders on the same team that were trying to chase him down. So, I just sat on them. Soon the smaller of the two started to move ahead and the bigger guy feel off the pace. I thought sweet, I am in third place. I didn't feel like I had gone too hard in the beginning but the road continued to get a steeper and steeper. No problem, I'll just down shift...... damn it! No more gears. Not many choices now, time to grind it out. It wasn't too long until riders were passing me.... and passing me..... then more riders came by. At the top, I was cooked. Before the race, I felt I could hit around 45 minutes but missed that mark by a couple of minutes, 48:21. If I had a few more gears I would like to think I could have gone a lot better but.... too bad so sad. I went from that 3rd place on the road to 22nd at the line. Ouch

The entire trip home I was questioning my training plan. Where had I gone wrong? Has my training plan be working on the wrong things? How could I fix it? Should I be going harder? Should I make some changes? What changes should I make? Or should I not worry about it, continue with the plan and just see what happens?

Wow, that's a lot of difficult questions for the self coached weekend warrior. I'll have to think about this one before I make any major changes. After all, this wasn't a high priority race (sure, I wanted to do better but....) and I have never performed that well in HC drag races anyway. Had I made the correct choice moving to sport from beginner. Well, if I had raced beginner I would have been second, that would have been great but felt wrong. So, I am in the right place, now for the challenge of improving and chasing down the rabbits in front of me!