Breck Epic- Stage 1

Ok, so I haven’t said much since Dolores, and I DO have some fun photos and stuff from the couple of pre-race days in Breck, but I figured I’d post real quick about yesterday’s stage since I’ve got a few minutes before I have to get to stage 2 this morning.

First off, I have Matt here with me, which has already made life soooo much easier. I can come in and drop bottles in the sink, and by the time I get out of the shower, the bottles are clean and refilled, and the condo smells like lunch. He’s also on drop bag duty, so he’s been riding my drop bags down to race HQ every morning at 7:30am while I sit around and drink coffee. As I type, he’s giving my bike a once-over and making sure it’s ready for today.

Yesterday’s stage was tough (ok, they all are, but that one’s a hair gnarlier because of the French Gulch climb in the middle). As I mentioned previously, I’m going with a lower gear this year (32×22) than I did last year (32×21). The combination of better fitness and gearing means that I’m riding a lot more and walking a lot less. The combination of riding more/hiking less means that I’m going faster overall…

1podium

 

Yeah, it’s only two of us in the category, but, the stats that make it really awesome include coming in with a time of 4hrs, 10min… ~30min after the first open woman (same as what Dax, the lead male SSer did vs. the open men), and 40 minutes faster than last year.

I couldn’t have had a better first day. My pacing and nutrition was spot-on, my legs felt great, and, I ended up with nearly an hour on 2nd place. The only “downside” to my day was the enduro classification- between having fork problems, being on a low gear, and not quite being acclimated to the speed of the descents out here, I’m likely to be waaaay down in the women’s standings. Luckily, today, the fork issues are solved- the SRAM neutral support guys replaces my old dual air SID World Cup fork with a brand freakin’ new soloair SID World Cup. Holy awesome.

I gotta go ride now…

One thought on “Breck Epic- Stage 1

  1. Really more relevant for the last post, but for this new beet juice craze, I give you Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume:
    “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

    Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

    The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

    The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

    The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”

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