Maskenthine

When I found out that Steve was bringing the girls back to Bettendorf for a visit this weekend, I have to admit that I was really hoping this race would get rained out for a third time this year so that we could go back and have some twin time instead of driving to BFE, Nebraska for a bike meet. However, the weather had better ideas and the day was picture-perfect to race on the dirt. Aside from the 3.5 hour duration, the drive over was great.

As usual, I was hoping for a decent turn-out of females to compete against. But, also as usual, there was just one other woman who made the trip (which, as it turned out, was only about a 10 minute drive for her). My recon lap went well, but I recall thinking that the laps were pretty short, so I assumed that we'd be doing at least three laps. Standing on the starting line, I was shocked to find out that the Cat 2 women were only scheduled for 2 laps. I tried to convince the other competitor that we should do three laps, but she declined. This was gonna be a quick race for us.

We started with the 45+ Cat 2 men, and I took the lead (after the men...) into the most technical section following the start up the gravel road. That may have been a mistake as Rhonda, the other woman, really had a home field advantage, living so close to the venue. I'm sure she had a better grasp on how to get through this section, and my suspicions were confirmed because she was right on my butt throughout that whole portion. The course opens up a bit after the initial section of single track, so I was able to slowly pull away. It took me the first half of the lap to get my gap to stick, though.

My legs weren't great at during my warm-up or lap one, but they really started to feel pretty good at the beginning of lap two. With Chequamegon coming up in three short weeks, I wanted to push the pace in the more open sections to see what I could do and to make sure I was getting a decent workout and not just putting in the minimum to win. When I dropped the hammer, I started picking people off, one by one, and sometimes three at a time. At one point, I even passed the (lone) Cat 1 woman racer who started 2 minutes ahead of me!

All too soon, the second lap was over and so was my race. I was just starting to feel good, too! The most disappointing part was that I had driven 3.5 hours each way for what ended up being less than a one hour race. In fact, I got done with my race, waited for Rhonda to finish, watched for Cam to come by a couple minutes later to start his fourth lap, made it back to the car to change clothes, and was back before Cam came around again.

Too short. Bummer. I could have used a good, long, high intensity workout to help prep for Chequamegon. It is what it is, though.

Cam had an outstanding race. He let Kevin lead for a couple of laps before whipping past him and never looking back. He won by 3.5 minutes.

Two Ws for Team Vardaman-Kirkpatrick again! We were home in time for me to get up the next morning and still make the trip to the Quad-Cities for a quick visit with Steve and the girls and some Happy Joes pizza!