Guindon Park. Photo by David Bilenkey.

For some reason I was feeling a bit nervous during the drive out to Guindon Park on Sunday morning. I didn’t have my normal race-day stomach… but my head was swirling with racing thoughts. In fact I even said something to Marc along the lines of “maybe if I hadn’t had a better race last week I wouldn’t want to do even better this week.”… Yes, that old crazy brain was showing up again. Luckily Marc is the consistent voice of reason and I was soon back-on-track to simply going out and riding my bike.

(Flash forward to the drive home from Cornwall after the race…)

Marc, “so how do you feel about the race?”

Me, “I don’t know really. Not satisfied. I just didn’t have the same feelings that I did last week in North Gower.”

To put it simply and without going into the nitty gritty details, I simply held back. I held back when I should have gone for it. I was afraid of going too deep and not being able to recover. I think it was the course/wind combined with my insecurities with my fitness level. I didn’t have the belief that I could recover from hitting the long road section really hard (instead I sat on and “recovered”). I didn’t drill it from the lap finish to the uphill barriers and then use the descent for recovery (instead I attacked the finish section, rode kind of hard and then ran hardish up the hill). I didn’t grind it out in the hard sections where I know people naturally slow down (instead I slowed down as well).

The one thing that did work was my last lap attack (of course I should have done this much earlier in the race…). I noticed that on that tricky little single barrier I was very slow to remount and my close competitor (Naomi) was in the same position. I decided to gamble and instead of trying to remount right away on the slight uphill angle, I took an extra running step and remounted on the flat gravel road – this enabled me to get a faster and more smooth remount and I was able to sprint immediately and really drill into the finish. This short burst was a great moment – I put myself in that deep dark spot – my breathing was sharp and high-pitched, my legs were cranky – and best of all it worked.

So why didn’t I do this through-out the race? I did this in North Gower just a week earlier. When I finished the race in North Gower it took me a while to gain my composure and be able to actually talk. This is what I want to feel.

Well, a good lesson learned in Cornwall. Huge kudos to Naomi – she raced a great race and really rode the twisty technical stuff well. She doesn’t quit and I’m glad she was there to keep egging me on.

(I’ll be missing the next two races in the Eastern Ontario Cyclo-Cross Series. This weekend we’re off to Winnipeg for the Canadian National Cyclo-Cross Championships (Marc is racing – I’m cheering). The following weekend we’re off to Northampton, MA for the super awesome Cycle-Smart International race weekend (Marc is racing – I’m cheering). But I’ll be itching to go in Perth…)

A huge congrats to the women who come on out to our weekly cyclocross skills practice – these women have made huge gains this season and it’s so awesome to see them improving and even better to see and hear how happy they are with their racing.

(In non-bike pedaling news – I had a great appointment with my gastro doctor… My methotrexate dose has been reduced in half and I don’t have to go for weekly injections anymore (now just a bunch of pills once a week). This is great news since that methotrexate injection really made me feel awful every Thursday.)