I was hoping to have a great race report for you all to read, but yesterday’s race was not really deserving.

I was really stoked when I saw that some other 1/2/3 women had signed up for the race. One of them- Kat Williams- was borrowing my Surly Crosscheck. I learned later that when she was warming up, she’d ridden part of a lap of the course then gone back to the car to ask how she was supposed to shift (it’s a singlespeed).

When the race started, I took the holeshot. For the first and part of the second lap, I swapped leads with Heather Ladd from Little Rock (the last time I raced Heather was at the Ouachita Challenge- we were leapfrogging each other on the first part of the race when I had to stop and pee. She ended up beating me by a little less than a minute.) Then, over a bumpy, rooty section, I dropped my chain. Damned single ring…

So, I stopped and put my chain back on, then started chasing. The top-end power I needed for chasing was not there. Eventually, Kat caught up to me and passed me (she caught Heather as well and ended up winning- considering she’d never ridden a singlespeed, and the bike weight was likely equal to a quarter of her body weight, it was a monumental case of “it’s not about the bike”). I hung out in 3rd place, hoping that none of the cat 4 women would catch up to me. Heather was never more than about 20 seconds ahead of me, I just couldn’t get the power out to close the gap.

A couple of photos that Ryan took before he went to warm up for his race…

I know that cyclocross intensity has not been the focus of my training. I went for a 3 hour endurance ride in the rain on Saturday. That’s generally been my training lately. I guess this is relevant to my previous post. It’s a sacrifice I’ve made in pursuit of a more important goal.

Losing still sucks ass, though.

In other news- we just got a new kitty from a local rescue group! He’s super sweet, has already gained 20 grams (we weighed him on the kitchen/bike parts scale), and he’s quite fearless.