The Dirt Field

The Race: Crystal Cup, day 2 of the Air Force Cycling Classic

The Course: 60 minutes

The Field: Pro 1/2 women

The Finish: 7th

After Saturday’s race, I spent the remainder of the day planted on the couch at home. It was awesome – the first time in ages I can remember squandering 8+ hours of time doing nothing except watching movies and surfing the Internet. My goal was to rest my legs as much as possible, and by Sunday morning, the plan seemed to have worked because my legs felt relatively fresh. Traffic on 110 getting into Crystal City had me anxious about being late and the parking situation required carrying the bike, all of my drinks, my gear bag, a cooler, the trainer, and the trainer block through a somewhat challenging route, but a very nice guy from NCVC stepped in to help and everything came together smoothly with plenty of time to warm up.

The course was an interesting shape, but I’ve gotten to the point after so many crits that I don’t let the course worry me. Everyone is going to have to do the same turns and everyone has the same goal of not crashing, so why let it freak me out? The only concerning thing was the quality of the pavement – between potholes, cracks, and manhole covers, it felt like racing through a back alley in NYC and required a greater degree of attentiveness than usual.

After the start, I stayed towards the back of the field to avoid expending extra energy and getting caught in the temptation to chase the attacks Colavita and Tibco kept launching. There were riders off the front for most of the race, but from what I could see, nothing was sticking and it was just attack after attack. Towards the middle of the race, I moved up and started doing some chasing/bridging (not sure which, as sometimes it seemed like I was taking the whole field with me and other times I was alone or with only one other rider). But then I realized I was not riding smart and that the two big teams had plenty of riders to keep launching off the front while I was just burning up my matches needlessly. So I melted back into the field, waited until around two laps to go to move up, and then got into position on the last lap. It wasn’t perfect – I was a little farther back in the pack than I would have preferred, but it was a big improvement over my past few crits and I was happy. The sprint started halfway up the stretch to the finish, and I did the pain/anger/kill face as hard as I could to ride into 7th place.

It felt great, not only because it was my best finish in an NRC race to date, but also because it was another instance of specifically identifying a weak area and correcting it. Somerville was a mess because I was afraid to ride in the field, so at Liberty, I got more comfortable at moving around in the pack. Clarendon was a disappointing finish because I worked too hard and didn’t set up well at the end, so at Crystal Cup, I was more conservative and then put out the effort to get better positioning when it was time. It’s cool to feel like I’m actually able to improve where it’s needed.

One other thing I’d like to note. When I was a mountain biker, people in that world would talk about roadies being elitist and pretentious and so forth. That’s simply not true, and the area in which I notice it the most is within my own field of competitors. There are so many women who have been supportive of my racing and have provided helpful feedback and advice – Kacey Manderfield, Erin Silliman, Sarah Fader, Jennifer Maxwell, Laura Van Gilder, Catherine Freck, Tracy Lea, the list goes on – even though we’re all lining up to race against each other. To all of these ladies, I want to say thank you for being such cool people and for helping me get better at this thing we love to do.

*Thanks to Daniel Meaurio for the race photos.