Hello, yeah, well, it's been a while. After I said I was doing all of that finger/eye/leg crossing to keep the migraines at bay, it just didn't work.
A couple of weeks ago, I signed up to race in Arkansas, and got a migraine the very next day. Damn it.
I took some migraine meds and raced the next day anyway. So, in between and during my migraine battles, I did three races in the last couple of weeks. Here are some reports about them all:
We went to Fayetteville to race and I was worried the course would be too technical and too difficult for me since I haven't trained since sometime in July and I was weak from the lovely combo of the still there migraine and migraine meds. So, I was just fine with the course being easier to ride.
Saturday was beautiful in Fayetteville. It was warm and dry and the course was really fast. There was only one other woman in my category, so I knew I was going to get second anyway. Since I haven't raced since the end of August, I felt rusty at first. I just tried to stay steady. The other woman in my category was super fast and she took off at the start and I never saw her again. I did pass one of the women in the category higher than mine, but I think she may have been having troubles with her bike.
Earlier that month I asked the person in charge of such things within the Iowa Bicycle Racing Association if I could cat down - which means to go down to an easier category since my stupid health problems were preventing me from going very fast anymore. If I ever start feeling better on a regular basis and I can race better, I'll try to cat right back up, but for now, I basically demoted myself and I am just fine with that.
Mostly it means it's not quite so disheartening to race against people who are so much better than me that they take off and ride so fast, that I don't ever see them in the race, unless they lap me. Hopefully, now there will be people that I can actually be close to and see during my race. I guess we'll see if or how that works.
Anyway, I felt okay during the race. I wasn't afraid to ride anything, and I only crashed once when the muddy section we rode down hid a slippery root underneath my tire and I went down in that lovely mud.
Luckily, it usually doesn't hurt anything to crash in the mud at slower speeds, but it does make for some bad-ass photos.
So, basically. I got a participation prize, but I look at it like this: It's hard to get up off of the couch and go to a different town where you don't know anyone and there are very few women my age still trying to race, and obviously, there were only two women in my category of any age who made the effort to go out and play on their bikes. So, I'll take that participation prize and be glad for it.
The next day was a horse of a different color...And that color was brown. It rained six inches in Faytteville from Saturday night to Sunday night. My migraine was manageable during my Saturday race, but got way worse after I was done racing, so I took another migraine pill on Saturday. It seems like the more often I take meds, the more weakened I become.
I was the only woman in my category who showed up on that rainy Sunday, so if I could finish the race, I would win. That seems simple enough, right? Well, all that slippery mud and the little lakes to ride through made that a little less likely.
John raced right before me and while I was at the starting line, he came up and told me to run more of the course than he did. It would be faster. Usually, it's a badge of honor for people to ride their bikes, more than they run them during a cyclocross race, but with those conditions, it wasn't necessarily faster.
When we took off, I went out too hard, it was really difficult to try and plow through the mud and tall wet grass and it took a lot out of me.
I had to slow way down, and let a couple of people pass me so I wouldn't blow up and have to quit. Once I got a better pace and figured out that I needed to listen to John and run more of the course than I had at the beginning, I started to pass a lot of those people back.
I was the only person in my category, but they put all of the different women's categories together and added most of the junior racers too, so I tried to compete against any of those people who were near me. I passed four or five people before they pulled us off the course...And I finished, so I won.
I felt like I deserved my participation trophy (or free tires in this case) even more on that day. Anyone who rode in that muck and mess was a winner, as far as I'm concerned.
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| Thanks to Burne Sippy for the Twisted CX photos. |
My third race this month happened last weekend in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It was great to see a lot of women I hadn't been able to hang out with all season, even if I'm still in no shape to compete against them.
As always in cyclocross, the weather was a consideration. this time it was cold. I hadn't raced in cold temps since Nationals in December, and it seems like I forget from year to year, what I need to wear in what temperatures. I just brought everything I could think of and it worked for the most part.
I did pretty well with my clothing choices, and my feet were really the only part of me that felt cold during my race.
Luckily for me, Twisted CX has a master's women category, but it's only 35+, so some of the women are still 20 years younger than me, but at least it's something...
There were seven women in my race. I knew I wasn't in any kind of shape to be competitive, but the only way I can get better is to keep trying to race. Of course, I had another migraine on Friday, so I took more meds. That's 3 days in that past week for taking meds, for those who are keeping score. Ugh! One of these days I'll do a race where I haven't had chronic migraines and have to take meds that make me exhausted, but who knows when that will be.
Anywhooo, I did my thing and I was in fourth for most of the race in my category. There was a woman right behind me and I noticed that she ran the sandy section, and I got a little time when I rode it, so I kept trying to ride it, and the 2nd to last lap, I lost momentum and had to get off my bike and run the rest of the sand. I have no idea how, because I wasn't even on my bike, but I tripped and basically did a face plant in the sand, giving the woman behind me a fine opportunity to pass me.
I tried to catch her the rest of the race, and I also tried to ride the sand again on the last lap, where I lost momentum again and got even further behind her. Sigh.
I ended up finishing fifth in my category, which was just fine.
These days I'm just thrilled when I feel well enough to race. Even when I don't get a participation prize, just being able to show up and, well, participate feels like winning this year.
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