Being entirely addicted to road racing now, I was looking forward to another Tour, after having just raced Tour of Page County a week prior. 24 women signed up for my category 4, which is unusually high. The Tour started with a time trial on Saturday morning followed by the criterium in the afternoon and a Road Race on Sunday.

The time trial was 10mi and flat. I raced the time trial with a moderate effort and hoped to place omewhere in the Top 5. That didn’t quite happen when I realized that I almost got passed by the girl behind me and saw the results: 11th place. Not a good start into a Stage race.

I hoped that the crit would work better and it definitely did. After a few laps, the front group including me dropped everyone but six riders. We had a good pace and it all came down to a downhill sprint after a corner. Corner is good but downhill not so much. Approaching the finish line, I stuck to the second wheel and we started sprinting on the downhill. I tried to stand up to sprint but couldn’t get my cadence right so I sat down and got closer to the front person but unfortunately not enough to pass her. In addition, another girl came around and passed both of us so I ended up third.

The road race the next day started in the…

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Categories: Triathlons

Road Race

I had high hopes going into the Tour of Page County. I knew the courses would suit me well as they had some challenging climbs. On Saturday, the Women Cat 4 race started at 8:05am and it involved 2.5 laps, about 30miles. 20 women started in a moderate pace, nothing crazy. The first half of the course was pretty much flat. The second half would be the challenge as it was all hills and pretty steep ones too. Patty from my team set a good pace at the beginning of the hills, and I thought I would get dropped already.

The first lap ended with me sprinting by myself up to the finish line to get the king of mountain points. No one else went for it, which I was surprised about. Despite a good pace on the hills on the second hill, we did not drop that many riders and our group still involved about 10 riders. I also got the second king of mountain and I was not really challenged by anyone. Since we still had a lot of riders in the group, I knew that once again it all would come down to a sprint uphill finish and it did.

The two Bike Pro shop girls whom I haven’t seen the entire race suddenly moved up and started the sprint to the finish. I followed and had to take the longer way to the finish…

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Categories: Triathlons

If one of the races I have done describes all facets of Adventure Racing, this is it! Our team experienced the lowest low and the highest high in 24 hours. Nothing of this race could be described as easy and nothing was predictable, which made the race an interesting challenge.

The 1 day Odyssey Adventure Race started on Saturday, July 23^rd at 12pm and went until Sunday 12pm. It was about 96 degrees at the start time, no question that the heat was a determining factor how well teams will do. 41 teams signed up for the race taking the challenge to survive heat, 100mi racing, and an elevation change of 25,000 feet.

After we got the maps at 8:30am on Saturday, we planned our race. The race looked like the following: 2 miles running prologue, 40 miles mountain biking, 27 mi trekking, 15 mi paddling, 19 mi biking, orienteering. The numbers are estimated because as I will describe later, we never made it to the paddling section! The race director gave us a cut-off time for the first mountain bike part. We had to be done with the first section at 2am; that meant 14 hours to bike 40 miles. We thought that was plenty of time to bike 40 miles. But we learnt soon enough that a lot of team struggled with that cut off.

Our team started with the prologue running the 2 miles and we…

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Categories: Adventure Racing, Race Reports

On Friday, two NAVY guys and I decided to drive out to the Chesapeake Bay to swim to the Sandy Point light house and back…2 km round trip. Austin, one of the NAVY guys, supplied me with a wetsuit and some fins. Having arrived there and putting all our gear on, I realized that the fins were way too big. This was very discouraging because there is no way that I would swim to the light house without fins so the two guys made their way to the light house without me. I did not want to give up yet so I asked some beach fellows whether they have tape or anything to attach the fins to my feet. The first person had nothing, second guy unfortunately nothing… but the third guy, an English, had duct tape, which he got out of his truck. He then strapped the duct tape on my feet while I was sitting wondering how in the world I would ever get rid of all that stuff later. I was about to get up after this attachment procedure and fell back again because the angle of the fins to my feet did not allow me to stand up anymore. No problem for an English and so he offered me to pickiback me into the ocean. I felt like a stranded wale or maybe Ariel in the Little Mermaid. Once in the water, I took on the…

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Categories: Adventure Racing, Athletes, Swimming, Training

For the 2-day adventure race challenge Endorphin Fix in Hinton, West Virginia, I joined up with Team Berlin Bike.  As a relative newbie to adventure racing, I was delighted to be part of a team that was National Champion in 2007.

On Thursday, March 25th 2010, I was picked up by my three future teammates, Ben, Ernie, and Rafael, as well as Rafael’s father. The five hours drive to WV helped a lot to get to know each other, and after the drive I was pretty sure it would be a good race.

On Friday at 9:30am we got the maps and Ernie and Ben mapped out our course. (I don’t know how long each of these sections ended up taking, but you can safely assume each was long) First, we started with a bike prologue followed by a trekking section (12mi), canoe section (3mi), trekking (10mi?), biking (long), trekking (ok long), biking (nightmare), canoe (relaxing), biking (nightmare again), and canoe (sprint to the finish!).

The bike prologue started out really well for me because I was able to impress my new teammates by falling into the creek, soaking my gloves and pants right from the start.   Because 50 hours otherwise would be just way too easy, right? The following trek section almost killed me because Ernie set a speed that I would not even do in a 12 hours race. Also, the weight of my backpack felt like carrying…

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Categories: Adventure Racing, Race Reports