Race Clean. Own Your Victory.: Princeton ECCC weekend

Monday, March 26, 2012

Princeton ECCC weekend

Spent the weekend in New Jersey participating in Princeton's Jersey Devil ECCC race. Although the weather was less than ideal, the racing was outta' this world. The weekend was packed full of some pretty hard racing, but nonetheless I was very happy with how the weekend went.

Saturday's RR...finished in time before the skies opened up.

I raced in the women's A field for all three races, and had a blast smashing my junior gearing with the big girls. In Saturday's road race, I settled for 8th place after a less-than ideal finish (tail wind, down-hill sprint finish...yeah that was rough), but I was pretty happy with how I rode the rest of the race. I attacked multiple times on the steepest hill on the course, but no dice. Even bridging the gap up to the two lead riders didn't fly.

Here I am at the start of the uphill ITT.

Sunday was a long day: we woke up at 5am in order to get to the itt course (uphill, 4.6miles) for our early starts. We made the mistake of leaving the trainers at home (unheard of!), so I had to be creative with my warm-up. Anyways, for about seventeen minutes or so I took a trip to Anaerobic-Ville, where I am always guaranteed a good time. I passed 5 other women in my race and ended up 10th.

Sunday's circuit race.

The final race on Sunday for me was a 50 minute circuit race. I was able to get in a nap while I waited for the other races to finish up, and didn't really do anything too exciting for my warm-up for this race. The field was pretty big, and my goal was to just sit in and counter attack when possible. It was a tricky course for a solo breakaway, or even a breakaway, because the course just wasn't technical. In the end after sitting in mostly and matching any (failed) break-away attempts, the finish came down to a field sprint. I held onto my line and snocked 'em en da spurt and walked away with a 3rd place finish.