Nationals 2009

Hello friends!

Well, road nationals is over and I’m home and back in lab, still kind of on Pacific time, but good other than that. Overall, it was a good trip. I did some good racing and some not so good racing, rode on some nice roads, ate some tasty food (including about 2 pounds of cherries), met some nice people, saw a good movie, and generally got to visit a state I’d never been to before. BUT I’ll skip all that and just give you the details on the road race, last Thursday.
SO Nationals. Nationals, in the 3 years that I’ve gone now, can be a funny road race. Depending on the course, it can vary vastly in how teams will try to race it, from the race 2 years ago in seven springs, PA where it was a climber’s race and teamwork had little effect, to last year’s race where the sprinters cleaned up. This year was something in the middle, and well, I thought the climbers would win, and guessed wrong. But that’s getting ahead of myself.
Tuesday, I landed in Portland in what felt for my body like the wee hours of the morning, but my bike, transportation, a hotel to spend a night in in Portland, the drive from Portland to Bend all went perfectly. The kind of trip that’s so smooth the stories are all boring! After getting to Bend, I spend Wednesday afternoon putting my bike together and checking out the course. It was HOT and DRY but the course is nice, winding through ranchland and state park/forest.
Thursday’s race started at 8:15am and what with the cooler morning temperatures and the fact that I was still mostly on Eastern time meant I was OK with that. For once having the less prestigious start time of the day was a blessing! The race had a neutral start since Bend is full of roundabouts (each with a different and distinctive piece of public art in the middle), so racing started after we cleared the second roundabout. Amber from Tibco attacked pretty much right away and rode solo for several laps. Interestingly, teams didn’t work too hard to shut her down, and instead tried to bridge other solo riders up to her…which didn’t work, and eventually she came back. I was betting that the hills were going to be tough enough to split the field, so tried to kind of keep my eye on the attacks but mostly to watch the climbers on the hills and to be in a good place on the climbs. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened. Instead, for most of the race, the climbing was hard but not field-shattering, and what ultimately won the race was a break that formed early in the final lap. There was a crash in the feed-zone the final lap, but Kate and I managed to stay clear and upright, and on the final climb of the race, finally the climbers pushed to the front and broke things up. Unfortunately, I was a bit too far back at the bottom of the climb and couldn’t ever quite get up to Mara Abbott and Evie; instead I ended up in the next little chase group. We pushed it a bit over the last few miles in to the finish and I came in in the middle of my little group, finishing 14th out of the elite women and 15th if you count the top U23. Kate was in the next little group behind me, finishing 24th or 28th depending on how you count. Meredith Miller from team Tibco won the race by attacking out of the break. While you can read all about it in all sorts of places, I just have to say that hearing her talk with the announcer after the race, sometimes you just hear someone and think, wow. She seems like an articulate, gracious woman and a great person to be wearing the stars and stripes for the year (since it wasn’t in the cards for our team to take it). After the race, Kate and I went and got tasty fruit smoothies, sat in the chilly river to rest our legs for a bit, and generally tried to recover from the race and for the next day’s time-trials.

Kate’s going to tell you all about the time trial, but I’ll just give you a cliff note’s version: 35km is LONG when you’re alone. It was darn hot. Borrowed fancy carbon/disk wheels make exciting whooshing sounds. I finished, yay!
See y’all on the road,
Anna