The Dirt Field

Today was the second stage of Valley of the Sun and, despite sounding like Louis Armstrong on a bad day and hacking up green blobs that deserve their own area codes, I am still in the race and happy about it. I didn’t commit to starting the time trial until the officials pushed me off the start ramp and then figured what the hell, I’m wearing this ridiculous helmet and can always stop pedaling if things get really bad. But it’s a time trial; if things aren’t feeling bad, you’re not going hard enough, and so I finished.

When I wasn’t feeling worse this morning, I decided to start the road race and then stop if my symptoms worsened. My symptoms worsened exponentially right about the time I followed an attack from Andrea Dvorak up the main climb (PAIN), and again when I made the break (MORE PAIN), but just when I was certain the tortured donkey in my lungs had heaved his final breath, things would ease up. Then the stage ended and now there is only one more stage. Assuming I don’t wake up with pneumonia tomorrow (which at moments feels like a real assumption), I’m going to start and give everything I can muster for my teammates.

This seems to be how we roll. Everybody gives everything they’ve got: Julie has the same virus and had to sit out the race, so she’s spent the last two days working her butt off to support us, run errands, and work the feed zone, all while being sick. Suzanna has raced while also using her professional massage skills to fix our legs each night.  We don’t have staff here, so we make it work as a team: prep bottles and food, help each other in any way we can, and spend all day making jokes and remembering that racing is supposed to be both hard and fun. The results have been tangible – a 2nd place finish for Laura on stage 2 – and intangible, in the certainty that together we can do anything and make it funny in the process.