Earlier in the Summer, Chad from Nimblewear asked if I’d be interested in the “Wheelers and Dealers” race at Interbike. I wasn’t sure if I was going to Interbike, and was less sure that I wanted to race, so I told him I’d get back to him.  Fast forward to August-ish, and I decided that I was game for both. However, when I went to register, I saw that the Wheelers and Dealers race registration was full. So, I entered the Elite Race. Nevermind that it’d be my first CX race of the season, my first Elite-level race since 2009, and that I’d never flown with my bike anywhere.

Wednesday morning, I paid the $150 one-way ticket for my bike and headed off to Vegas. Thankfully, my flight was a direct one, and, with the hop across two time zones, I landed with plenty of time to find a shuttle, get checked in (side note- when you check in “early” at a Vegas hotel, they charge you out the ass), and put my bike together. Turns out, I’d have one more chore… when the plane landed and I touched base with the person who was supposed to give me a ride from the strip to the course, he informed me that he’d decided not to go, and that his car was full of stuff from the previous day’s outdoors demo event…

So, while I was in the process of shuttling, getting my bike together, etc, I mentally prepared myself to ride to the course from the hotel (not a huge deal, but not what I really wanted to do, given my lack of planning for that sort of thing). However, I enlisted the powers of social media and found a ride with a friend of pro racer Adam Myerson.

Hotel room workstand:

After finding lunch and settling in, I needed to find the expo center and touch base with the Nimblewear guys, who’d made a special Interbike-edition pink houndstooth skinsuit for me (see right edge of photo)

(Side note- Haven’t found any action shots… Even though I raced head to head with both Amanda Carey and Judy Freeman throughout the race, all of the photographers managed to keep me out of those ladies’ photos.)

Nimblewear’s got a new long sleeve skinsuit cut that I’m gonna have to get my hands on soon. IT’S GOT THUMBHOLES!!!!

I only got lost 3 times while trying to get through the 2 casinos that separated the lobby of the Luxor from the convention center in the Mandalay.

After hanging out for a few minutes, I headed back to the room too put my feet up and roll my legs before meeting up with Chad (the Twitter connection) to get out to the race venue. As I was walking in, I saw Bob Roll:

Then, I found the guys from Swiftwick, who had their van set up right next to the course. They were nice enough to let me camp out there a little (ok, a lot), change in their van, and help me pin my numbers. If you’ve never owned a pair of Swiftwick socks, comment below, tell me why, and I’ll email you back with a code for 40% off a pair from their website. Your only regret will be figuring out what  to do with all of your other socks.

I made sure to start rolling around a little earlier than usual to warm my legs up slowly after flying/walking all day. They were  little argumentative at first, but eventually the power started to creep back. As soon as the course was open, I headed out for a pre-ride. The course gets a bum rep for being a “grass crit” and lacking in technical features. True, it’s a super power-course, but, as I’d find out later, being able to ride “crit” speed on wide open grass turns is a technical skill in and of itself.

As bib number 51 of 54, I had the honor of a back-row spot in staging. I didn’t stress it, though, and it actually turned out to be beneficial to NOT being caught in the pileup that happened just before the first left-hander off the start line. As soon as we were into the first turns of the course, I was starting to get into a good rhythm. I also noticed that most of the women around me were going slower around the turns than I wanted to. Once I was around them, I started trying to pace myself and use the momentum of “grass crit” turning to my advantage. It was working great until one of the last turns of the lap, when I came out of my coasting a little early and drove my left pedal into the ground at 500 watts. My mistake lifted my rear wheel and bounced it diagonally into the ground hard enough to burp air from the rear tire and stack me into the grass.

When I got up and remounted, my rear tire squirmed and the rim threatened to bump the ground, ending my “turn faster than everyone else” strategy. Oops. The remainder of the race had me head-to-head with Rebecca Gross (master’s worlds 2012 winner), Judy Freeman (from the Crank Brothers team), and Amanda Carey (among others). The crowds were amazing, and, around the run-up area, the sound was nearly deafening.

The last two laps, I was fading hard, and, as the last lap started, a small group came around me. Amanda was in the back of it, so I hopped on her wheel. The rest of the group started to pull away, but I didn’t want to blow myself up harder by trying to stay with them. So, I stayed where I was and caught my breath enough so that, as we approached the last long, heavy-grass power hill of the course, I went around with everything I had left. I didn’t want to look behind me, but on the last set of stairs, I could hear the crowd yelling for Amanda. I dug harder and finished a few seconds ahead of her and just behind the group that’d passed a few minutes earlier… 32nd place.

The dust and the effort on course absolutely destroyed me. I cooled down and got a ride back to the hotel just as the men’s race was staging. Great race? Hell yeah- it’s awesome to have a rowdy crowd and a lot of really amazing women to race against. Back at the hotel, I cleaned up and struck out on a dinner mission, finding a fancy burger place just before the kitchen closed. In bed by midnight on my first night in Vegas… hell yeah again.

One week from now, I’m going to be packing up to fly to Vegas for Interbike. This year, I’m taking my cyclocross bike and participating in the circus that is CrossVegas. I’m somewhat under-prepared to race any sort of cyclocross one week from tomorrow, much less the only elite-level race I’ve entered since going to a USGP event in Louisville back in 2009, but what intervals and drills I have done are feeling good, so hopefully I’ll be better than DFL. Trial by fire is my favorite.

The biggest concern I’ve got about the race is not actually the race itself, but getting from my hotel to the CX venue several miles away. Riding there isn’t an option- the roads are terrible with traffic, and I’ll only have my tubulars on my bike, so the risk of flatting and being stranded in a Vegas ghetto is far too great. So, I’m asking everybody I know who will be there if they know of anyone who can give me a ride (fallback plan is to get in with the Nimblewear guys, but they’re gonna be running their booth at the indoor show until it closes, which puts me on a ridiculously tight schedule). There’s also the question of space in the rental car for such an endeavor.

Other than that, Thursday and Friday will be straight hustle from morning ’til whenever the hell I can get to sleep. It seems like once you’re in the black hole of Vegas, it’s suddenly 1am when you thought it as just 10. This trip, I’m lining things up ahead of time. More on the sponsor hunt after the show, though. For now, I’ll leave it all a mystery.

Short post today… I’ve gotta get some breakfast and get on my bike. As a household, we’ve taken to seeing who can net the best time for the route down the wolf river trail to stanky creek and back. Right now, it’s anyone’s game, as Ryan and Matt rolled a time that was faster than mine in rolling numbers, but longer than mine in total elapsed time (Matt made several adjustments to his new bike during the trip). So, today, I’m planning to set the record straight.

It was a hot weekend.

Like, Dirty South, 96 degree w/65% humidity hot. In an effort to avoid the heat as much as possible, Matt and I waited until Saturday afternoon to make the 3 hour trip down to Ackerman, MS to set up camp the night before the Hard Nox race. We arrived just in time to get the tent & hammock up and change for a quick spin of the course start with Frank Webber before it was totally dark. I’m pretty happy that we did, because it was beneficial to know that the initial miles of singletrack were pretty tight and twisty (a lot like the Stanky Creek trails in Memphis). We made it up the first “climb” before hightailing it back to camp. My legs felt great, so I was looking forward to some serious pedal smashing the next day.

After a luxurious ham sandwich dinner, the darkness of the great outdoors activated the magic of human physiology and had us yawning and sleepy by 9pm. Somewhere around midnight, I had my only injury of the weekend when I managed to sprain my left thumb in my sleep. I don’t know why or how, but I can only assume I jammed it into the ground at a high rate of speed and folded it backwards. It woke me up and proceeded to give me nightmares about spraining all of my other fingers, which meant that I’d wake up every hour or two wiggling all of my fingers to make sure that I hadn’t hurt more than just my thumb. Luckily, by morning, it was just a dull, annoying ache accompanied by constant popping.

Sunday morning, race prep went well. I had my coffee and yogurt and changed in time to roll around for about 20 minutes before the race started. As 7:52 hit, someone told me that the 8am race start was pushed back to 8:30. So, I went back to camp, had some water, a Roctane gel, and tried to stay cool. Eventually it was time to roll down to the lake and get set up for the LeMans start. Strategy- set my bike up on the left edge of the road just behind a local guy who I knew would be smooth in his run/mount.

That strategy has never failed me, and I ended up very well placed (first woman, just behind the lead pack of men) as we rounded the turns out of the lake area and towards the trails. I was feeling great, and, once I had a good pack “spot” established, I backed off of “starting” pace and into “maintenance” pace. The trail to the mid-lap aid station was very roller-y and rooty, with lots of trees in the exits of blind turns. It kept you working. Luckily, a lot of the trail after the aid station was less complicated, and made it easier to take a slight mental break and just pedal.

I rolled into the pit area at 2 hours, 11 minutes and stopped briefly at my cooler to get fresh bottles and an extra pack of Gu Chomps. As I headed back out for lap two (a slightly modified version of lap 1), I could tell that, despite my pacing and hydration, the heat was really starting to get to me. I felt the deathmarch looming over me as my quads writhed inside my skin, threatening to cramp. About halfway to the mid-lap aid station, my left toes started to hurt like hell (same issue I’ve had in the past and haven’t sorted out yet), and I was forced to stop for several minutes to get them to quit feeling like they were being clamped with vice grips. I figured at that point that Laureen Coffelt, who tends to motor along at a slower, steady pace, was catching up to me.

I eventually made it to the aid station, had some electrolytes, and dumped several cups of ice water over myself. I focused on staying steady for the last 12 miles, taking some comfort in the thought that the course was “easier” on that end. However, I hadn’t realized that the 2nd half of the 2nd lap was different than the 2nd half of the 1st lap- meaning the trail following the aid station was just as roll-y and rooty as the 1st half instead of smoother and easier. I was majorly overheating, my left toes were trying to fall off of my foot, and it was all I could do to not think about anything other than pedaling and keeping my shit together long enough to get to the finish (I was mostly thinking of Laureen bearing down upon me any time I wasn’t going as hard as I could, which, looking at the power file, was at an intensity that’d normally be “recovery ride” speed).

I finally made it in 4 hours, 37 minutes.

In conjunction with plenty of electrolytes from various sources, I drank somewhere between 4.5 and 5 liters of liquid during the race. Afterwards, I ate a lunch, snacked all the way home, and drank a lot more. When I arrived home, I was still 5 pounds under my normal weight. There’s no telling how dehydrated I was. It was too hot to keep up with the water loss.

As is customary for winning a race with a decent cash purse, I took the guys out for sushi dinner, where we inhaled several highly Americanized, gigantic sushi rolls, topped with glorified mayonnaise and soy sauce.  I’m done with racing in the heat for this year.

Suddenly, along with the dusting off of cyclocross bikes, something else is looming on the horizon… Interbike.

It’s the Vegas shindig where racers (among 1000s of other people) go on a door to door (or booth to booth) networking extravaganza in an attempt to make the right connections that will lead them to the sponsorship pot of gold at the end of a Vegas rainbow paved in glitter and lined in feather boas. Sometimes, the people you meet turn out to have a genuine interest, and it’s the beginning of a mutually beneficial rider-sponsor relationship (Nimblewear, for example). Other times, they smile in your face then never call back (I’ll not name names, but they know who they are). As a privateer athlete, it makes sense for me to go and shamelessly plug my ability to put forth an easily-recognizable face and promote a sponsor’s product via my mastery of both social media and of actual face-to-face interaction.

Last year, I went in with somewhat of a plan of who to talk to, etc. I quickly found out, though, that A) sometimes you need to schedule your meetings in advance, and B) it can be the more random interactions that bring about the best results. As a result, I’m going to pick a few companies to schedule an actual meeting with while also trying to get to know everyone else along the way. My goal is to pay for a little bit less of my equipment than what I do now… anything else is just glitter-filled icing on the cake.

Just to complicate things, I entered the USAC Crossvegas race. I’d originally thought it’d be fun to do the Industry race for Nimblewear, but I slept on it too long and the category filled up. I could still do the elite race, but it’d be an exercise in extreme ass-kicking. Might still be fun, though.

To-Do List:
-Update Race Resume
-Update Business Cards
-Find out the name of everyone’s marketing person
-Email the marketing people I want to meet
-Figure out how to get a CX bike to Vegas and back
-Shit, I need a plane ticket, too
-Fill flask with whiskey
-Trim mohawk
-Get WC Color fill on left arm tattoo

That should do it.