Sunburst

We started our pre-race day evening off with our standard pre-race meal Saturday night. . . . .chicken, pasta, baked beans & bread. Then we attempted this new little treat for dessert. They were a bit of work, but they were absolutely delicious! A small little cake that oozed out chocolate & caramel as you poked your fork into it. Yummy.

From there it was some nice conversation with friends and a semi-restful evening in order to prepare for the Sunburst Showdown the next day, which I KNEW was going to hurt.

Sunday morning came quickly and as I was warming up I knew it was going to be a tough day. My stomach felt terrible, I had a really tough time getting my heart rate up comfortably on the warm up (it hurt way too much for a warm-up) and I felt like I was going to puke. My legs had no zip, I felt like I had ridden too hard the day before, and I knew it was going to be a long haul. But Sunburst always is for me. It is NOT my kind of course. I don't do well with all out heart attack courses. I favor short, steep, killer climbs and gnarly, technical single track. Mix in a fair amount of those things, and I'm likely to have a fairly good race (Phillips, Iola, Rhinelander). But I figured I'd give it what I could and see what happened. My goal was to finish and to NOT have to walk ANY of it, no matter how tired I got. And I accomplished that goal.

Looking through the pictures, I found it interesting that I'm just about the only woman who's "glistening" from sweat. Someone asked me if I went through the sprinkler tent. . . . .was there one? No, I just plain sweat THAT much. It's crazy.

Picture courtesy of Rusty

I had some stiff competition, but managed to snag 7th out of only 19 Sport women. If you average out my lap times, that puts me at just under 26 minutes a lap (with the prologue lap counted in there). That would have had me winning citizen, and placing 8th out of 10 in expert (if I could have held that for one more lap).

In fact, I found it interesting to look back on my results for the year to see where I placed throughout the year. It's a surprising picture, given my erratic results, especially with my goals to move up next year, but that's a post for another day.

In the mean time, we had some great finishes on our team yesterday as well. Captain looked fabulous as he rode past the easy up with ease each lap. Then he proceeded to beat himself up later, thinking he didn't push hard enough. He does that after every race. I guess that's a sign of wanting better things for yourself. . . . . when you constantly question what you could do differently to get better results.

And these guys worked their butts off for their overall finishes as well.


It may have been a smaller field at Sunburst. . . . but there sure were a lot of fast people. We may have lost 1 or 2 of the "crazy fast" Sport women, but we also gained a couple as well. You just never know who's going to be there, and what kind of day they're going to have.

All in all, Sunburst is NOT at the top of my list in terms of "WORS races I most enjoy", but it's definitely a challenge and it's good to have a mix throughout the year.

Now it's time to recover again, and focus on the last 2 races of my WORS career as a Sport rider. Hopefully I can pull some good overall results on these last 2, because the competition is tough. And I tell you, either I'm getting slower, or the top 10 Sport women are getting faster. And I don't think I'm getting slower.