Race Weekend Four!

Grand Junction, the first hill climb and road race of the season! Plus a crazy crit thrown in there as well. Saturday was the hill climb up through the CO Monument. Very pretty, lots of corners, a few tunnels, and I did pretty bad....10th out of 12 or so. Oh well, it was a power climb for sure, Tirrel got second I believe, or maybe 3rd, but she was up there! Rachel was right behind Tirrel and I'm not sure where Julia ended up. The crit was insane and I didn't like it one bit. It was on a track used for racing little tiny go carts, so all the turns were way too sharp, and it was pretty narrow for a lot of it, and there was AT LEAST one crash in every category race the whole day! No fun! They tried to do a twilight crit as well; the Mens A started at 7pm! They ended up having to cut it short because they didn't have enough lights and it was getting dangerously dark. I was so nervous the whole race..please don't crash, please don't crash:)
The road race was a real wake-up call. The course has always been particularly brutal, this year seemed a bit better, but I still ended up in no mans land for a little while. A group got away after the first climb and the other three CSU girls were in it, so I took it upon myself to mess with the three CU girls that I got caught with. It was the easiest first lap of that course I've ever done! I did no work, and messed with their rotation until they got so frustrated they started attacking each other...and then the other two girls would pull back their own attacks! It was AWESOME! The second lap, one CU girl and I dropped the other two, caught up to Julia and then tried to bridge to the first group. The CU girl and I made, Julia did not, then as soon as we got up to the front group, I was all impertinent and said "let's get organized! We shouldn't have caught you!" So they proceeded to drop me...I was alone for awhile until Julia caught up, and we rolled turns the third lap and into the finish. The wind was so strong up on top, I literally couldn't keep my bike going straight and almost went off the road a few times. Julia ended up getting a good gap along the top and through the switch backs down to the finishing stretch. I would have caught her if we'd had about two more miles...Anyway, it was brutal and I was soooooo tired!!! I couldn't function until Caley made me a recovery bottle:)
Looking forward to a rest weekend, time to do some long rides maybe...we'll see how work goes.
-Megan

Mesa Crit nonsense