Flats!

So the big weekend has come and gone and neither of us came home with a new jersey.

What happened? After blowing up early and making a dumb mistake, I fought my way back to second and then blew it. I was pushing too hard on the descent, riding my XC bike like a DH bike and double flatted. With only one spare tube I didn't even stop, I rode the last bit of the race with two flats and held onto third. Honestly third felt like last. It sucked horribly.

I waited around for a long time at the finish line, hacking and coughing my brains out, waiting for Allison to finish. After watching all the girls I knew she was in front of come through the finish line, and asking everyone I saw if they saw someone wearing a green argyle jersey, I found out that she had flatted. Whew! I thought maybe she crashed.

Turns out she had a really hard time trying to fix the flat rear tire and spent about 40 minutes on the course working on it/begging for help. It sucks pretty bad because when I passed her earlier in the race she had dropped every other expert woman and was not far behind the Pro women. Kudos to her for sticking it out though, no DNF for her. She was the last participant to cross the line and I am proud of her for that.

Now what? Nothing changes. We train and prepare for the next race. Like a machine with no emotion we will continue on despite the loss. We have a few more races before the season is over and each one of them counts. After that? You guessed it, training and preparing for next year! Who needs down time? Harden the fuck up!