The Mount Hood Cycling Classic...was painful! When you didn't think they could make a race harder...they found a way! Not only were the stages longer but most involved more veritcal feet of climbing. The best part of the whole race was staying with my teammate from Cannondale Sue Butler and her husband Tim and a gagle load of other suffering racers. They have the most awesome cabin right on Mt.Hood and had the most awesome beer to comfort me at the end of each painful stage.
The Prologue was about the only unchanged stage out of the 6 brutal ones. It consisted of 3 miles of pure all out hell!
Then came the Columbia hills road race, this was an ~84 mile race. It was a 3 lap course which consisted of a nice easy pace for about 90% followed by a total Lactic acid threshold climb to the KOM. It was freaking painful! Finally we came around for the last time and started the decent towards the finish (it's a very gradual down hill)It started with a Aaron's girl coming across my front wheel on the real downhill and her open jersey catching my handle bar, which damn near caused a majorly catastrophic crash, but thankfully my phenomenal bike handling skills and a hell of a lot of luck we managed to stay upright. I caught my breath as we came around the hairpin and started to try and set Amy up for the finish. I did my best and she managed to set herself up right onto Kat Carrol's wheel! In the final sprint she pulled off and amazing 3rd place finish and I came fighting in behind her for a nice 5th.
The easy part was over and nothing but hell was left to great us for the next four stages.
The temp in Hood this year was a nice 90's...basically the rest of the races consisted of survival. Trying to recover as best as possible, I found a nice porter after each race aided the recovery nicely, and hydrate a best as possible, again the porter did a great job at this. Thanks Timmy!
Overall it was a great training race, brutal and hard. Can you tell I am already bored of typing about it??? Which means you are probably even more bored.
About Me
- Emily Van Meter
- One of the fortunate few to be born and raised in Alameda, Ca! Raised with two super fantastic wonderful older brothers and extremely supportive parents. Aside from that was also fortunate to be apart of the amazing A-town posse!
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1 comments:
Nice report! Sorry you won't be out here at Fitchy. Not like there's any particularly good beer out there to be had. But I did just come back from PA with a whole case of Yuengling (they don't have that stuff up here). Cheers!
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