Today was the Xterra East Championship in Richmond Virginia. Not only is this my favorite race ever, Richmond is one of my favorite cities, and some of my favorite people happened to be racing there too (yeah VT TRI!). So here it goes…
Sunday 5:30 AM- Wake-up, because the kind race directors moved the start time forward 30 min to avoid the sweltering heat. Why they didn’t think of this in previous years?…. I dunno. 6:30- get to the race site and take my good sweet time setting up transition, chatting with other racers… you know the drill. 8:30- the race starts. The swim went surprisingly well, considering I have been swimming approximately 5 times since I moved up to Philly. The river had a decent amount of water and the current wasn’t too bad so there was minimal scrambling this year. I got out of the water at the front of my wave and even caught a big chunk of the wave in front of me. Yeah I know… totally weird! So I have decided that the secret to swimming fast… is to not swim at all. Ha just kidding, it is to swim with amazing coaches (thanks Holden!). So the bike leg went pretty well. I still really need to work on my bike handling skills though, the technicallity of the Richmond trails definitely slowed me down. I took a decent spill pre-riding on Saturday that resulted in some sweet “trail rash” up my leg, a blue and purple hip and some smashed fingers… but no big crashes during the race! (I KNOW… WEIRD!) Waaay better than the last year with that whole handle bar to the groin, black leg internal bleeding hematoma thing…ouch. So then the run, AMAZING. I felt great, super relaxed, really light and fast. I passed a bunch of people on the run (you know the ones that have sweet mountain biking skills). I finished stong, feeling great, but definitely worn out. My goal was to hit 3:00, nine minutes faster than last year. Darndest thing…; I went 2:50, improving last year’s time by 19 minutes!!! I still got 2nd in my age group though, so no qualifying slot for Worlds. The fastest overall amateur (from Boulder, CO) just happened to be 24 and therefore in my age group. Dude she was fast…. got me by like 4 minutes! I’m going to have work really hard over the next couple of months to get ready for Nationals. I should probably acquire some bike handling skills. Can you buy those? I get an employee discount at Cadence…maybe I can order them from QBP 
Now I have to go bake some stuff…I owe a couple friendly mecahnics at Cadence a bunch of cookies for fixing my brakes at the last minute before I left
