Highlands Road Race - A Rider's View
 
It feels like I've been here a week. Every hour seems like another day. Time goes so slow when you have nothing to do, nothing except race your bike, eat, sleep, recover and then do it all over again. My legs feel like I've been racing a week, and I've only raced 70K so far. I just want to know what amount of sacrifice and suffering it takes to get to be as strong as these women are.

I've put in thousands of miles already this year, worked my ass off training and racing and I am still so far behind! Granted, I have a full time job, but I still put in 15-20 hours a week on the bike. How do they do it?
It would help to have a team with full support. Here we are, four women on their own, no one to help, one set of spare wheels between us and minimal wrenching skills. Saturn has a semi full of bikes. T-Mobile, Saturn, Rona, and Red 5 have nice fancy tents to warm up under. We were stuck trying to "warm up" on the roads on an unusual morning in SoCal where it was barely 50 degrees and raining.

At one point, we dove into the cars as it started to hail. Here we are, looking like total Freds in our plain red jerseys, shivering on the start line while the Trek guys are standing with one of their riders, letting her stay bundled up in a warm coat until the gun. I wonder, what comes first? Do you get on a team because you're fast and strong? Or do you get fast and strong because you're on a team with all that support?

The circuit race course was eight laps that were 5 miles long, and had a stair-step climb that gained about 500 feet every lap. The rain had stopped by the time we started, and my cold legs stung with complaints as we hit the climb in the first half mile. The pace was mercifully sane, and I moved myself up before the steepest last part of the climb so I could slowly drift back and save my energy during it. The streets were lined with children from the schools the course encircled, and they held signs and screamed at the top of their lungs for us. That was so cool!

At the top of the hill, we turned into a vicious headwind onto a fast downhill straight. I knew staying on a wheel for this would be crucial, and I tucked myself in behind the tallest woman I could find.

The sprint bonus on the second lap went to Nicole Freedman, I think, and the pace stayed relatively sane, but a crash on lap three involving a Rona rider and Alison Dunlap caused a bit of a stir, and I found myself at the back of a split at the top of the climb. I waited for the group behind to come up, and worked with another woman from Rona and a few others to tack back on before the end of the lap.

The next few laps started to really hurt, and the hill got steeper every time we went up it. I was suffering like a dog when I heard someone talking into their radio saying that Dede Barry was attacking. I thought, "I would love to have enough energy to attack right now, but I'm just barely surviving." On the headwind straight, the break was still in sight, and I knew the next lap would be a fast one. There were climber points on the line.

The group sat up before the climb, and I tucked myself in the pack. When we hit the 200m mark for the KOM points, I was in sight of the front of the pack, but those 200m were the longest 200m of my life. I was just ten feet from the top when I blew spectacularly and lost contact. I wound up chasing with pretty much the exact same group I was in before, only this time they made it back up to the pack and I was left in no man's land. I rolled in with a group of six two laps later, probably 10 minutes down.

I hear Dede stayed away in a break with Ina Teutenberg, who took the stage while Tina Mayolo took the field sprint. My team suffered on this stage. We lost Jen who had come down with a nasty virus after the prologue and dropped out during the race. Being able to breathe is really important in a race like this. Immediately after the race, Jen was bummed, I was bummed, Kele was hurting, and Natalie, bless her heart, rolled up with a huge smile and something positive to say. She threw up somewhere during the race and still finished. No pun intended, that takes guts. Tomorrow is another day. I hope I find my race legs somewhere - 81 miles with an uphill finish will pare the field down even more. I hope I don't end up on the cutting room floor.

Until next time...

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