Oh. My. Fucking. God.
I’m as equally disappointed as I am proud of myself.
Hold on a second — gotta hoist myself out of the bathtub because my quads and/or hamstrings will seize up at any moment.
So, I was down from first by five minutes. I was hoping to catch and pass her somewhere along the course and cut into that time gap.
I caught her at the aid station and pulled a Keegan (was it him?) and attacked. I saw my riding buddy, Jamie, and we started riding together.
I told him I had to push to make a gap between me and the first place chick.
And I swear to bob, I thought I pushed hard. I pushed when it would have been a helluva lot easier to dial it back.
I still hadn’t seen her at Aid Station 2 with 10 miles to go. My legs were toast. We probably still had 2,000-something feet to still climb. We turn off the road on to a single track and it was just straight tf up.
I didn’t have that power in me. Jamie eventually dropped me. I hung on to some other dude’s wheel and wouldn’t you know, a pink jersey was creeping behind me.
It was the first place chick.
Then bro slid out, stopped me in my tracks, and she pedaled around us.
I was disappointed in myself in pushing so (what I thought was) gd hard to cut into the time gap and there she was, looking cool as a fuggin’ cucumber.
And then we continued to climb. And climb. And climb.
When we finally crossed the finish my first and most important task at hand was to find Jackky for a hug and a dust-soaked kiss. He has been helping me so much this week and I couldn’t do it without him.
From taking bottles and clothes to washing my bike at the end of the day to making me all my meals to cleaning all my shit to refilling all of my bottles to massaging me at the end of the day. I truly hit the jackpot.
Today’s stats:
40.5 miles
6,525’ of climbing
2nd in the women’s 30+ GC