Hi there! Still alive. Lots to share about the summer, but we’ll save most of it for later. Road racing season has come to a close and while it’s fresh in my mind I might as well write about it!

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Killer camping and biking weekend w/ the team at McKenzie River and Pass

I had an amazing off-season thanks to my Kickr. Came into the season with a ton more focused miles and strength than ever before, but my mind wasn’t really there. Life, burnout from 31 races in 2015, crashing in the final race last year… In the end I didn’t really race much – ten races, mostly weeknight series.

The bulk of my racing was at the Tabor series. I upgraded in the middle to end of the series last year and it was a struggle. I had resigned myself to winning prime laps and hoping to hang on. This year with added fitness and down about 10 pounds, I actually had some climbing skills! I still couldn’t hang with the big guns for the final sprint, but I was there at the end of the race and even capable of going for primes and recovering as if they didn’t happen. Last year I averaged 15th place, this year… hrm, only 11th, but it was overall a much stronger note than last. I finally got things together with a 6th in the final race with lots of gas left so while I think I had the fitness all along, I simply didn’t know how to race it until the end.

On a whim, I went out and raced the state championship down in Eugene. It would be my first and only proper road race of the year. Things were going pretty well in the 3/4 race, but it was an extremely hot day and without support it was not possible on the two bottles I had. With ten miles to go (sixty mile race) I ran out of fluids and my body shutdown. Pretty miraculous I made it to the finish. I probably should have stopped when I noticed myself woozily avoiding riding into ditches on uphills. Yeah, bad… A lot of folks didn’t finish that day so I don’t feel too bad about it, but it was a lot of effort for naught. I hadn’t done a lot of long riding this year either so I pretty much set myself up for failure by not knowing the resources I’d need to get through it or even having the muscle memory/makeup to make the ride possible.

No podiums, but also not much effort. I’m the strongest I’ve ever been and (spoiler alert!) it’s really showing in cyclocross. I’ll provide a wrap-up of that and other things around November.

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