Day 1 & 2 of Steamboat Racing

After a smooth ride into Steamboat Thursday night, we headed out for a fun dinner with Dean, our amazing homestay. Great conversation and turns out we all know tons of the same people. Such a small world!

Since we didn't start our TT until 6pm, Marilyn and I went and visited the Smartwool Headquarters (per my client's request) and came out with a nice pair of winter socks! We then headed out to do a few laps of course to spin out the legs. Super fun course with a killer climb.

The course is a 4.5 mile loop at Marabou Ranch, which is absolutely gorgeous and has a big climb as well as a ripping fast technical descent! Although I've never done a 10min hard TT effort like this before, I was really excited to see how it all panned out. Definitely a lot harder than I had anticipated but I managed to finish 12/23 for the Women's 1-2-3, 35+ category.

Since we didn't race until 3:15pm today, we took another trip (on behalf of a client) and visited the Sports Authority in town to take a few photos of displays, etc., then went and wandered around town, hit up the Farmer's market and people watched all the tourist around for the holiday weekend.

Today's race was again at Marabou Ranch. We actually rode the same loop as the TT, just backwards...and several times over for that matter. We were supposed to do 8 laps but since it was silly hot and the course was so brutally hard, they decided to change it to 6. Marilyn and I were both kinda bummed at first, but laughed about it afterwards as 8 might have killed us.

The circuit race started pretty mellow for the first lap. The girls definitely pushed the first climb and luckily I slipped into the lead pack. The 2nd and 3rd laps was pretty uneventful but a bit harder. Right at the base of the climb on the 4th lap is where things got interesting. An attack was made and there was no way I was gonna be able to hold it so I tried to stay with the other girls who couldn't either. The main group split into 3 smaller groups. I moved into the last one with 2 other girls and rode with them until midway through the 5th lap where I totally exploded and ended up riding solo for the lap 1.5 laps. I'm pretty sure I was going backwards at that point and lost over 2.5min over that distance. Luckily I was able to stay away from the group behind and finished 10th and moved into 10th for GC. Nothing special but I definitely know what I need to work on if I want to be able to hold that intensity for a long period of time :) The best part of the day was that Marilyn kicked butt and took the big win!!! Way to go Chica, you're such a rockstar!

Check out the race blog for more exciting news and I promise to post more exciting pictures as soon as I can get my hands on them!