UNR Race Weekend

Ah. It's always nice to get to sleep in my own bed before a race. And to not drive. I'm dreading the drive down to Kern (Bakersfield . . . sweet) in a couple of weeks, so every opportunity to not drive is welcome. So, my school team, UNR, hosted WCCC championships. Lots of folks drove up from LA and San Diego - way too long to drive for a bike race. But hopefully they had fun. Here's a few highlights.

My friend's yellow van hooked up to the porta-potties. So classic. Interestingly enough (no, actually not interesting at all) during this race season I've heard more names for porta-potties than ever before. (See, I told you it wasn't interesting.) But they're still porta-potties as far as I'm concerned. Also notice our awesome volunteers, many of them who raced, and some super awesome significant others who came out to lend a hand.

This isn't really a highlight, more of a low light. People seemed to have a hard time staying upright in the 120 degree turn at the bottom of our course. Ooops.

Cody raced the D's, and I was very proud of him. Ironically, the men's D's were the only field where no one crashed on the sketchy corner. I think that tell us something. It says, "Hey, you folks may be fast, but you don't have the sense to not attack in the corner that already took out 10 people. Get a clue." Sorry, that was unnecessarily hostile. But my weekend was kinda full of unnecessary hostility, so I feel that it's in keeping.

Speaking of which, there was a whole lot of negative racing going on this weekend. This is me sprinting it out in the crit alone after I almost got taken out in the gnar corner in the 2nd to last lap. That was after I towed the "chase" group around for, oh, 18 of the 27 laps we did. A few girls got off the front after the first crash. They were super duper strong. Anyway, every other girl who was in my group had a teammate in the break, so they all just sat up and let them go. Once I realized this I figured it was better to go down fighting, so I went to the front and hammered as hard as I could for the rest of the race, until the aforementioned crash left me alone in the wind. Bummer. Sure, I didn't really think we could catch the lead group, but if I hadn't been working so hard I'm pretty sure we woulda been lapped, so it was totally worth it.

Haha, more hostility - during the road race on the previous day I told the group I was with to "Chill the f*** out and start being nice to eachother." A couple of girls were being all bossy and mean and kept sniping at everyone else and I just couldn't take it anymore. Oddly enough, my totally out of line comment seemed to do the trick, and everyone started being nice. Either that or they just decided I was a horrible person and then didn't want to talk to me at all? Whatever. I'm usually pretty nonconfrontational, too, so that was pretty out of character.

The lesson from this weekend? Okay, every weekend? And the occasional week day? I love racing my bike. But I guess I already knew that so it's a stupid lesson anyway. Back to the real world . . .