With my knee issue at the start of the year, I felt like i've had a hard time getting back up to speed. Now that my “new” knee pain is out of the way, my knee feels more like I remembered it did last year! Hopefully someday, I will be able to say that I can ride with no pain. I am just thankful that I am able to do everything that I am doing right now. After surgery a few years back, I didn’t think that I was going to be able to do half of what I am doing now.
Fast forward to today, I feel that I have been lucky to finish as well as I have at this point. The down side to finishing well for me is that mentally I see that I have the potential to do well in the series and in turn I expect more from myself at each race. Each race has been a new challenge and has pointed out strengths/weaknesses in my riding/training. Bloomer showed that I hadn’t been riding my MTB enough and didn’t have the confidence to ride fast in the tight stuff. Brighton confirmed the same and showed that I really need to pre-ride prior to each race. Ruby proved that giving my MTB some single track love would help with my results, not to mention that I pre-rode the week prior. I have been really happy with my fitness as this point as my lap times remain pretty consistent from lap to lap.
This Saturday’s race at Stony Creek is probably going to make or break my season as it is a double points event and needless to say I had a less than stellar performance at the first double points race at Brighton. The series takes your best finish between the 2 double points events to count as your double points race for the series and the other one will count as single points. I’ve been pushing my recovery limits since the Ruby race, rode the Stony Marathon course on Monday, Intervals on Tuesday, lots of sleep from Wednesday on, eating the right foods (which surprisingly dropped 2 lbs off!!) and will do an easy pre-ride tomorrow... all in preparation for this race. Stony is a Marathon race that is 40 miles compared to our normal sport races that are around 20mile. Last year I had major cramping halfway through the race, so I am also putting together a plan for better nutrient/hydration. All and all I feel I am back on my game and am hoping to have a couple more decent finishes in the sport class before moving up to expert.
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