Like I mentioned before, I was highly undecided as to whether I’d race this weekend. Coach had said something along the lines of, “racing this weekend will either put your fitness over the top or into a hole for Whiskey next weekend.”

Friday morning, I felt pretty good… still undecided, though. I had a bunch of errands to run, yoga, a PT appointment, and a ride to see how I was feeling. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I was thinking about bike racing and heard this song:

 

I can’t explain why, but while I was listening to it, I decided to take my chances and race.  After the errands were done, I went home and pulled my Cannondale SuperX off of the wall, put some fresh sealant in the tires (running my favorite wheel/tire setup for this sort of race- Industry 9 i25TL road wheels and some tubeless CX tires), and installed a 34t small ring in place of the 36t that was on my CX crank at the time. There was an 11-26 cassette on the wheels already, and I didn’t feel like hunting down the 11-28, so I decided I’d just go for it on the gearing. By 5:00, I was packed and ready to roll to Perryville, AR.

Fast forward a little, and I’m in a quaint motel on Harris Brake Lake just south of Perryville. One thing I’ve learned through half a year of gluten-free eating is how to make a pretty good chicken/veggie/rice bowl prior to going out of town. It takes a little extra work on the front end, but having a healthy meal waiting for you when you arrive into the middle of nowhere at 9:00pm is totally worth it…

 

I battled through a night of fitful sleep (the little Harris Brake motel is nice, but the walls are paper-thin, and apparently the guys next door were in & out all night fishing or something). Saturday morning, it was 37deg cold, and the sunrise was beautiful…

I had some breakfast and packed everything into the car to go to registration. I paid, briefly discussed my views on pros who feel “entitled” to race any race they want, went to the start, and rode around a little trying to warm up. Luckily, the start of the race is a neutral rollout past the Perryville city limits. It has potential to be somewhat of a clusterufck (like any mass-start-for-all MTB race), so I lined up in the front and, when the signal was given to go, jumped into the slipstream of the lead vehicle… safety and a nice motorpace warmup, all in one!

Once the lead vehicle pulled off, a group of hammery guys formed. They took off hard up the first road climb, and I decided to slide back into the next group, which included another woman (Priscilla Cazer, who had finished 15 minutes after me at Ouachita). I hung with them as they chased after the lead group, and felt like I was going a little harder than I really wanted to given the 70 miles and lots of climbing we had ahead of us. I stuck with it, though, and, as we crested the top of the hill, Priscilla informed me that she was only racing the 45 mile “tour” version of the Slobberknocker.

Ohhhh… ok.

We turned off of the main road onto the gravel, and I backed off a little bit and had some gel to prep for the first of the bigger climbs. It was a good idea, because my legs really started to come back around just as I came to the initial pitches of the longest one of the day. I paced myself into a mix of “singlespeed” and seated-type climbing (not my favorite, but gearing and traction don’t always allow for standing on the steeper stuff), and felt good all the way up. I remembered on the way down that I was on a CX bike, and that I’d need to dial the descending down a notch or two in order to avoid killing a tire or something on one of the rowdy sections of forest road.

For a while, I basically rode in the same rhythm. Just like last year,  I had a few guys on MTBs that I’d pass going uphill, then they’d pass me back going downhill. It continued that way until just after the “rowdiest” section of “road” on the course (a sharp, washed out jeep road made mostly of exposed rock beds), when, on a seemingly normal gravel section, I cut my rear tire on a rock. Sealant went everywhere. Without panic, I pulled off and installed a tube as quickly as possible…

4 minutes and 8 seconds, to be exact.

Between the previous section of tricky road descending, the flat, and the long descent into the next aid station (an out & back section of the course), Laureen Coffelt  (riding a full suspension MTB and able to go waaaay faster than me downhill) put a serious dent into my lead. As I was about 100 feet out of the aid station, she was on her way in- maybe a minute back at the most. Knowing that she was a) wearing a camelback and not likely to stop and b) going to come out of it with extra motivation that I was so close, I stepped my climbing game up a notch or two.

At that point in the race, on a cyclocross bike, nothing doesn’t hurt. I’ve always said that, compared to racing on a mountain bike, the places where the CX bike is faster will outweigh the places where it’s slower. However, that comes with the caveat of “if you can deal with the fact that the roughness of the roads is going to make you hurt all over.” The forest roads around that area are pretty rocky, and have the ability to remove small cars from service, as I learned the hard way several years ago. At 3 hours in, not only do you have a healthy dose of climbing in your legs, but everything from your butt up to your neck/shoulders, arms, and hands is aching from the constant forest road beating.

It was at that point that I channeled something I’d learned about in Yoga… the idea of Santosha, or contentment. It’s something that I’d heard from several yoga instructors, but that Kirsti talked about at length during a challenging class the previous Thursday. As we were holding a particular pose for an extended period of time, she asked us to focus on the sensations that we were feeling right then rather than avoiding them. The idea was, rather than trying to tune out feelings of discomfort, to explore them and accept them as a means of finding Santosha. I found myself doing the same thing as I was hammering through the final two hours of racing. Rather than attaching negative emotions to the pain and trying to distract my mind into thinking about something else, I went back to the idea of accepting the discomfort and being content despite all of it.

During that time, I built my lead back up to nearly 20 minutes.

So, I won in a time of 4 hours, 53 minutes- about a minute faster than last year (though, last year, I hadn’t flatted). The Slobberknocker not only offers a nice cash prize, but the trophies are some of the best out there… handmade by a local firefighter:

 

Now, it’s a race to see how well I can recover before Friday evening’s Whiskey Fat-tire criterium and the 50-mile race on Sunday.

 

 

OK, here are the rules…

You are welcome to download any of these photos free of charge. If you want the high res file of yourself, I’d be happy to provide it- just email me andrea@brickhouseracing . com

There’s ONE stipulation, though- if you post one on a blog, send it in an email, post on a forum, etc… please also post a link to Brickhouse Racing (copy and paste from the address bar above). If you don’t, bad karma will make you flat during your next race.

You may have noticed that I didn’t post anything about training last week. Basically, last weekend, I had a wicked sore throat, and it developed into a full-on upper respiratory infection by Monday afternoon. I was on the couch/walking dead for most of the week before I finally started to turn the corner on Thursday. I was left with a lingering cough and just enough head congestion to produce epic snot rockets (both of which are still lingering… I woke up coughing and snotty this morning).

The original plan for the race was for Ryan, Matt, and me to board the dogs and all three pack up & camp at Todd “Antique Gun Show” Henne’s   property that sits just off the Womble trail about 20 minutes from the Race start (includes a sweet pump track as well). However, Thursday evening, Ryan stabbed himself in the thumb meat with a knife while trying to break into his Apple Time Capsule to replace the hard drive. After bleeding some and freaking out enough to pass out, Ryan figured out on Friday that he couldn’t use his right thumb to shift. So, he stayed in Memphis to road race, and Matt and I went to Arkansas.

The drive is always entertaining until Matt gets so crunk that he makes himself bonk.

 

We set up camp and rode a little bit of the Womble before going to packet pickup. We later discovered that there was a kennel full of barking dogs within a mile or two of Todd’s place, and we got to listen to at least one or two bark at most hours of the night. Matt was in his hammock with earplugs, so he was pretty cozy despite the noise. I can’t wear earplugs, because then I don’t sleep because I’m worried I’ll miss my alarm. So, between dogs and coughing, it was a long night.

Sunday morning, we woke up and immediately got in the car to go to Oden school for the start. Along the way, we stopped to drop a cooler full of bottles at Sims (the midpoint of the race course). After a little oatmeal and coffee, we lined up early so we’d have a good spot on the start line (the “neutral rollout” of the OC Race is pretty wild, and with Matt riding singlespeed, it was a move of both safety and strategy)

(Photo courtesy of the Ouachita Challenge/Ouachita Cycling Club FB page- for anyone wondering, Matt’s been MTB racing in a Brickhouse jersey this season since his usual team doesn’t support MTB racing. I told him it’s like a season of “tryouts” for getting in on the actual sponsor support next season)

As usual, the start was a hammerfest of bar-bumping and tire rubbing. Once the lead truck pulled out of the way, I was well-positioned around the other women who wanted to stick to the front of the race- Jessica Rawlings and another woman in a Dallas Bike Works kit. I realized (thanks to my new MTB Quarq powermeter) that as we approached the first climb, I was going a little too hard. The thing that kills a lot of people (myself included) at Ouachita is how badly you can blow yourself up at the start and on the first climb. I learned that the hard way, so this year, when Jessica and the Dallas woman pulled off with the lead men, I hung back and rode the climb at my own pace as the 3rd woman. I lost sight of Jessica, but the other woman came back to me about 3/4 of the way up. I knew I couldn’t chase Jessica at that point, so I settled in with the plan to slowly chip away at her lead as she got tired over the next 50 or so miles.

Once I was mostly up Brushy Mountain (first of 3 Ouachita Trail mountains), I was gettin’ it down the trail when I wonked my rear wheel on a rock. It started to feel a little mushy… then went flat. I made my way to the side of the trail and did what was probably the fastest trailside tube installation of my life. All the while, other ladies and riders were blowing past me (including Matt, who went by just before I got my wheel back on). It was early, so without panicking, I used the next two mountains (Blowout and Chalybeate) climbs to pick my way back through all but one of the women who had passed me earlier, landing me on the gravel/road section in 3rd position with Matt, who was somewhere in the top 10 in Singlespeed. Soon after, some geared guys came by us, and I left him to spin incessantly while I worked with them all the way to Sims.

At Sims, I did a quick bottle swap at the cooler and got back on the road. Only a couple of the guys I’d been with were close by, so I hopped in with them. We lost one guy on a hill, so me and a man on a Fisher swapped pulls until suddenly, the Dallas Bike Works woman was in sight. He pulled off and said he’d stay out of the way of our race. I caught her rear wheel just as we got back on the short section of Womble singletrack before the next aid station. When we came to a short, muddy hill, I took the soft line to the left and made the pass. With another 25 miles or so of racing ahead, I didn’t need a full-on attack, so I just stuck with the “slightly faster than you’re going” effort for the next few minutes and through the next aid to another gravel road section.

When I came out on the gravel, I could hear another rider on my wheel. Thinking it was her, I didn’t look back for a long time. When I felt like I’d pulled long enough, I checked over my shoulder and saw that the person behind me was actually the guy on the Fisher. He came around to take a pull and said something along the lines of , “you put the wood to her back there on the trail.” We’d only covered a mile or two at the most since I’d made the pass, and she was nowhere in sight.

At that point, I wasn’t feeling like a rockstar. I’ve been racing just long enough to realize that the “I’m gonna cramp later” twitch in my quads and the distance left to race was a combination that needed to be dealt with carefully. I didn’t have the gas to go for an all-out chase for the win, but I did have plenty in the tank to ride tempo in order to stay a steady 2nd and to catch 1st if she were to totally fall apart or have a major mechanical. So, I pounded some more Roctane and did just that. Jessica, however, was feeling like a rockstar, so I ended up holding on to 2nd place and finishing about 20 minutes after her (my flat change was only ~5 minutes, so it wasn’t really that pivotal in the results). My time of 5:40 is 15 better than my best effort on that course, so, given A)an upper respiratory infection, and B) this one me, exactly one month ago (to the hour) from the finish of Ouachita:

 

…I can’t let myself be too disappointed with not getting the win I was hoping to get as a season opener. After the race, I was still feeling the effects of my car accident. Essentially, with the physical stress of riding a mountain bike for that long, my right sacroiliac joint feels like an aluminum bike with a weak weld undergoing frame flex. It’s got me back on the ibuprophen and ice for a couple of days before I get back to my usual schedule to prep for the Whiskey 50.

A.K.A. One of the unluckiest/luckiest days of my life.

Saturday morning, Matt and I drove down to St. Francisville. We stopped on the north end of the course and pre rode the 2nd and 3rd (previous years, these were the 1st and 2nd, but the course was changed this year) sections of gravel. It was sandy and treacherous as usual. I was happy with the fit & feel of the new bike. In case you were wondering, a CAAD10 rides very nicely- the handling is great, and, though it’s a tiny bit less “rockety” than a super stiff carbon bike, it’s miles better than the 2009 Madone I briefly owned a couple of years ago.

Sunday morning, everything was shaping up for a good race. For the first time in 15 years, women had their own separate start (in previous years, they’d raced with cat 4 and/or masters men). I haven’t road raced in the area in a couple of years, so, other than Louise Smyth (a.k.a. best TTer in the South & last year’s winner) and Amy Phillips (who I’d met racing cyclocross in TN), I didn’t know who the horsepower of the bunch would be.

The race got off to a little bit of a slow start. Fine by me- we had 104 miles of course ahead of us. However, as we approached the fist gravel road section at about 18 miles in (a new addition to this year’s course), Louise, who’d been sitting on the back, moved up to the front of the group. I glued myself to her wheel, and, as we made a sketchy, loose, hairpin right-hander onto a gravel road, she and I got around clean while the rest of the field faltered.

Hammer = down.

Louise can throw down on some gravel. We pounded through the rest of the section, and as we neared the exit, looked back and saw that one lone rider, Amy Phillips, was dangling in no-man’s land behind us. We decided that with ~80 miles to go, it’d be wise to include another good rider into hammer time. The three of us worked our butts off to the next gravel section. Behind us, I can only imagine the infighting that was keeping the group from getting organized and chasing us down, but Louise and I agreed that it was unlikely that they’d catch us if we stayed steady.

Gravel #2 (the longest gravel section) was a little sketchier and sandier than the first section. We paced ourselves- going just hard enough to make it through everything smoothly, but not so recklessly that we couldn’t see the washouts and waterbars ahead of us. Unfortunately, right near the end of it, Louise stopped as we approached the crest of a hill. Amy and I stopped at the top and yelled back at her to see what was up, and she said that she’d dropped her chain. We soft pedaled for what seemed like an eternity (it was probably only about a minute, but in “off the front” time, it felt like 10) before deciding that we didn’t want to stick around long enough to see the rest of the group. So, Amy and I set out onto the road as a duo.

We agreed on sharing the work in steady, two minute pulls and settled in for what was going to be a long, hard day. Unfortunately, this is where the bad luck comes into play. At mile 58, we were on a long, flat, straight section of road. Amy mentioned that (because of the lack of hills or turns), this would be a good place to see if anyone was behind us. While she pulled, I took a good long look over my shoulder.

Nope, nothing back there except a car in the distance.

Seconds later, I heard a fraction of a second of car brakes panicking on the asphalt. Before it could register in my head what was happening, the car I’d seen behind me seconds before plowed into me and my bike. I was airborne long enough to picture myself dying on the side of the road. It was the most absolutely terrifying moment of my entire life because I was moving so fast, and everything hurt so bad.

(just typing this now is making me feel clammy and anxious)

The rest of my story is in a police report, and, because I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do “legally,” I’ll leave the details out except to say that I went to the hospital, was x-rayed, and was discharged with nothing broken. Just to clear up some of the rumors I’ve heard- no, it wasn’t a hit and run.

As for the race, Louise caught up with Amy, who’d stopped when I was hit. They battled it out for the QOM on the next gravel, then rode together til the last gravel, where Louise attacked her and rode in for the win.  I’m disappointed that I wasn’t there, but I’m happy that I’m not in a hospital or dead right now.