Bumping along in Phillips

Here it is midnight on Wednesday and I still haven't written a race report on Phillips. This is what happens every week, I get busy at the beginning of the week, then by Thursday or so I don't want to sit down for an hour or two and write when I should be doing laundry and getting ready for the next race that weekend.....

Anyway, I wasn't sure about going to Phillips. The long drive was a deterrent, and the idea of a weekend at home was very tempting. I decided to go, though, and got there a little before 1 am Saturday night. More sleep would have been nice, but, oh well, I am used to not getting a good sleep before race day at this point. When I got to the venue Sunday morning, the lot didn't seem as full as last year. I can think of at least 10 or more people I know that went last year that didn't go this year. Multiply that and it adds up.

The course was v-v-v-v-verrrry b-b-b-b-b-b-bumpppppy. It's a good thing I don't have a good memory for courses. For some reason I couldn't remember this one at all (except for the road leadout), although I could picture the campgrounds and I did remember how nice the volunteers were. If I had known how much the course would aggravate my back I might have stayed home. I don't get to WORS early enough to preride, so the courses are always a bit of a surprise. This one was a bumpy, dusty, teeth-rattling surprise!! Even the open areas were too bumpy, for me at least, to go fast and pass people.

It got windy and overcast before the start. Cooler, uh-oh. I heard them calling up the women earlier than usual, I had thought I had another 4 or 5 minutes, so I made a beeline over to the start and slipped into the start area just after my name was called. The road leadout went well for me, until we hit the hill. Then a clump of better hill climbers passed me. In the singletrack we had some raindrops, which fortunately didn't last for long at all. Then we heard air raid sirens. They kept going, and going, and......going. We were asking each other what was up. Tornado? war? I asked some volunteers - one said if I could hear the sirens I wasn't racing hard enough. Turns out they were probably summoning firefighters in town to a big fire. Thanks to all the volunteers that were out there directing us. There were lots of people to ask about the sirens, even if they didn't know the answer.

The people I usually see around me in a race passed me, which was discouraging. Shoulda gotten here earlier, gotten more sleep last night...a longer warm up... ridden less last week....eaten better.....all the stuff that goes through your mind.... I did more walking/running up hills than I would have liked, but I couldn't afford to crash on top of the pounding my back was getting. At one point I took a really big hit to the spine on a downhill - usually I can get out of the saddle in time for those giant ones but this one caught me totally by surprise. Boom!!! I could visualize my poor L5-S1 disc squishing out in all directions like a marshmallow in a squashed s'more. I was hoping that was not the case, but I couldn't shake the visual.

Near the middle of the second lap some people passed me that I wasn't expecting to see - that woke me up out of my haze and at that point I had to pour it on in the open sections, bumpy or not. I managed to pass most of them back, whew. Some of it I had to do at the squishy marshy grassy area near the end . I was expecting a long open stretch where I could gain some time and instead I was going "oh, yeah, now I remember this" as my tires sunk into marshy ground and I felt like I was swimming to the finish. Glub, glub....

Ahhhhh, the nice cold, wet towel at the finish. That I did remember. Perfect for the dust all over our legs. We sat down at the picnic table for a few minutes and dug in to the all you can eat watermelon! Yum! Sticky watermelon fingers and a nice cool cloth to wash them. Thanks again to the volunteers who had the washclothes and watermelon waiting for us!

The Sports got rained on and had they not been in the woods they might have blown away. The guy in the building with the walkie talkie told all the lunch-eaters not to leave the building due to the dangerous high winds. It was sunny by the Expert and Comp race. What a schizophrenic day! During the expert race the fairgrounds felt deserted because so many people drove over to the feed zone to watch and feed. It felt like everyone had gone home.

There were some impressive results - I don't remember them all right now, but I will congratulate fellow blogger Brittany on her awesome second place overall in sport as well as teammate John for winning his age group and placing well overall!

All the way home in the car, among other things, my tailbone ached. I squirmed around alot, trying to find a more comfortable position. When I told the chiropractor yesterday about the big hit to the spine, she said, "yeah, I can tell. Your tailbone got slammed into your sacrum, the tailbone area is puffy, and it affected your neck, too." It amazes me that they can pick up on stuff like that before we even tell them. I don't know how people on hardtails survived this race. Maybe it will catch up with them years down the road like it is with me. Hope not, though. I have this unwelcome vision of the bike racers' old age home, all of us hobbling around, bent over our canes and such after all the crashes we've all had over all the years. As Holly K. put it earlier this year when I was worrying a bit about injuries, you want to be able to walk when you are 80!