Vardaman, PI

Although I could barely walk after Dam to Dam on Saturday, my pride didn't really want to let me out of doing the mountain bike race the following day. I hobbled around the house in the morning trying to decide if I would feel better or worse if I rode. The final decision was to get out to Banner and see what I felt like after a warm-up lap, then sign up if all was good.

Having ridden the course once with Cam and Squirrel on Friday, I knew the race would be far from a cake-walk. Half of this course is as technical as I have ever ridden. Lots of off-camber, tight turns and challenging terrain requiring strong bike handling skills. The other half is flat and fast. As we took to the trail on Friday, I made a mental note of how bright and green everything looked as we entered the trail. We've had good rain:sunshine ratios lately, making the color of the flora jump right out at you!

Sunday was another bright, sunny day. I rode around on the pavement for about 30 minutes to see what the legs thought of moving again. Once they were a little warm, I headed down to the entrance to the singletrack. As soon as I got moving, I was reminded of just how challenging this course would be. Add the fatigued, sore legs and I was in for quite a ride.

After signing up and having Cam make a few minor adjustments to the 'Goose, I made my way to the start line and found two other women ready to go. Kim Hopkins and I would race in the Cat. 2 race and Cara Hamann would go for it in the Cat. 1 race. Cara is getting ready for Ironman Coeur d'Alene in a couple of weeks and just wanted a little longer effort to replace her typical training ride on the road. It sounded a little risky to me, but she was ready to roll...

All the Cat. 1 and Cat. 2 men and women were on the course at the same time. I knew that Cam and some of the other faster guys would lap us at some point, so I made another goal of not getting lapped twice! The females were doing 3 laps and Cam's class was doing 5. The starter said, "GO!!" and I told Kim to take the lead into the singletrack, as I had no idea what kind of effort I would be able to put forth with such wrecked legs.

As a group of us started up one of the first challenging climbs, the guy in front of me made a statement about how he really shouldn't have gone out to the bar the night before. I replied (and trumped his discovery) with a reply of how I really shouldn't have raced Dam to Dam the day before. He groaned and quit his whining after that!

I was all over the place during lap one, and what made things worse was that there were some singlespeed guys coming from behind, having started after the rest of the Cat. 2 riders. I did my best to get out of their way, but many times that meant taking a little side-trip into the greenery on the side of the trail. At one point I heard some dudes coming up behind me, so I tried to pull over. I was coming around a corner a little too hot right at that point and ended up off the trail at an unfortunate location. I'm sure it looked a lot worse than it was - in fact, I thought I was going to be taking the 'Goose on a long trip down a steep bank - but thankfully, I had things under more control than anyone (me included) thought.

Once I had me and the 'Goose back on the right track, I just continued testing myself through the rest of lap one. Challenging terrain doesn't scare me - I can just take things slowly (sometimes very slowly) and get through it. However, another little goal I had set for myself was to avoid a dip in the drink by staying steady on the couple little bridge crossings. If you are off by just a little bit, you take a swim. Remembering where the bridges were from my recon laps, I made special effort to slow down and take a deep breath both before and after each crossing, so I could keep things rolling in the right direction.

Lap 2 was much better. I was warmed-up and my mind was ready to conquer a few of the areas that had kicked my butt on lap one. Kim was out of my sight, so I turned this race into more of a training ride and technical riding lesson. Traffic was still an issue, as the nature of the trail was apparently kicking the butts of some of the guys in the race, too! We went back and forth a lot throughout the course. About halfway through my second lap I heard a fast bike coming up behind me, and I figured it was Cam. We were in the midst of a really fast, fun section of trail with no time or place for me to let him through, so we got to ride together (for a few seconds, anyway). I was really pleased to find a couple photos of this rare occurrence. I was even more pleased that I was in front of him at the time...

The rest of the race I just tried not to lose any more ground. I was pretty sure I'd never catch Kim and her fresh legs. The tone in my head alternated between swearing at Squirrel for creating such a highly technical course and thinking about what a great time I was having, despite the pain.

I crossed the finishline about 1:30 back from Kim, and was really happy to see Maria sitting by the finishline cheering. She was fresh out of the hospital, recovering from a significant crash in the Melon City Crit the week before. She looked great, even though she'd left her spleen (and a bunch of skin) in Muscatine. Cam finished a few minutes later, in first place.

My legs were truly cooked now. Sore, tired, and dirty. That was pretty much me in a nutshell. I wanted some dinner, a shower, and then a long, long night of sleep. Although I didn't know it at the time, tired legs were not to be the worst lingering reminder of the race.

Having spent a little time off the trail, I figured I had probably gotten into a little bit of the vast amounts of poison ivy along the way. I did my best to clean off my legs as soon as I finished, but was not too surprised to find a little bit on my legs in the following days. I was, however, surprised that it didn't stop there. I ended up with a pretty nasty case on both legs - it's gonna take a while to get rid of that...