Pendleton Bulldog Road Race

Fasting: 111
Breakfast:75g CHO, 4 units (large piece of sourdough toast, half peanut butter, half honey, coffee with milk and 2 tbs sugar)
then sipped Cytomax on the way up to the race; another 20g CHO (no coverage)

After my race at UCI, Daniel recommended that I drink coffee before races. Tammy does before her cycling races now, so I gave it a try here.

Pre warm up:198
Starting line:194
Finish: 159

I didn't take any correction before warm up, because I thought the 4 units on board might cause a big drop. I prepared for this and had a Juicy Juice box and fruit snacks in my jersey for warm up. But I ditched these along the fence at the start when I was 194 post-warm up.

I was feeling really good. I definitely think the coffee helped.
My goal for the race was to stay with the main pack over the hill that marked about half way. I knew I could tuck in on the downhills, and ride with people on the flats IF I could stay close enough over the climb. I was ready to ride as hard as possible going up, hoping that my quads would cooperate.


The race started a little faster than we thought it would. It wasn't hard to stay with the pack in terms of heart rate, but we had to pay attention and not let people get too far ahead. There was a lot of accelerating out of turns etc. I was having a blast drafting and cruising along and not working hard. Darlene, Lauren, Allison and I could talk if necessary, very different from time trialing.

Then at about mile 8 a woman crashed in front of me.
I had two people on my right, and three on my left (I think Darlene and Lauren were two of them) and I had nowhere to go but over. I attempted to jump her, but her bike had swung around and so I had about 10 ft of obstacle instead of just her body. I went down, pretty hard on my right side.

I got up and picked up my water bottle that had rolled part way across the street. I looked up and the pack was already pretty far away and I had only been down maybe 10 seconds. I was probably 30-40 seconds back when I started riding. *Insert choice exploitive here* Those seconds proved to be an eternity. I didn't know what chance I had to catch the pack with their drafting advantage. I rode the rest of the race like a Time Trial-not at all what I had gone there to do...

A few minutes before I fell we had seen Chris coming back the other way, and had cheered for him. Frank was in the next group and we yelled for him too. Then I fell...and a minute or two after I got back on I saw Richard coming back. There I was, riding by myself, only 8 miles into the race. I had a total ego-moment...after he cheered for me I said "I crashed!" Not wanting him to think I was riding as badly as it looked, I prayed he'd heard.
We all laughed about that afterward.

A big thank you to Chris for being there at the finish.

Darlene was 3rd overall, Allison won her age group, Lauren was 2nd in our age group, I was 3rd, and Amanda Smith was 4th. Chris was 2nd in his age group, missing the top 3 overall by just 2 seconds, Frank 5th AG, Richard 6th AG.

I'm pretty sore today. I rode in drops at practice instead of aero because my forearm is pretty raw (even through armwarmers!) My neck muscles are pretty sore and my intercostal muscles too. But other than that I am alright and my bike seems to be too.

Photos by Jan Burnham