Concord, NH Crit, Aiyana Curry, Women's 4s, Aug 5
Women’s 4s
20 finishers
Aiyana Currie – 4th
Catherine Womack – 18th
Challenging, but fun race. My plan going into this race was pretty simple – stick behind the known strong riders like Blout & PVC & work my way towards good positioning in the last 5 laps. Thanks to some coaching from Steve, I also planned to break the race down into 3rds – 5, 5 – and 5 for a total 15 lap race. I had a minor plan to go for an early prime.
I was a bit nervous before the start after a fairly tiring week. I started questioning my fitness level & Carol Decourcey (who also proved valuable mentally later) told me not to even question it. She had better wording, but my brain was fuzzy!
The first 5 laps & actually the first 9 laps flew by pretty quickly. I mainly tried to stay on good wheels and out of the front. There were a few people I learned to stay away from after some sketchy climbing and wide turns. I found myself a bit wobbly twice around one turn and tried to stay strong.
We dropped a group of riders a few laps in and later would sway between 6 and about 12 riders in the front pack. I was thinking we could stay ahewad as 6, but that didn’t pan out. Around lap 9 I was feeling pretty weak & Carol picked up on it – and my riding and said – “Aiyana, I know your tired – but hold your line!” and this was on a straight away. I needed that. We came around for a shout of 6 to go and I fixed my brain on the finish (ahh, primes had come & gone and based on my ‘thougheness factor’, let’s say, I opted not to go for any. I wanted to finsh this race strong!!).
So…6 laps to go and I was sitting somehwere around 10th. At each lap around, I moved my way up, tick, tick, tick until 1 lap to go I was sitting around 3rd or 4th wheel. I let myself get pushed out a bit on the far corner, but fought back into 4th wheel around the last turn. Melody (NHCC) had launched an attack just before that corner. I hindsight, I wish I’d gone with her. I caught up (as did the rest of the group) and decided to launch my sprint around a different rider than Melody. I think it was one of the PVC girls. I launched ‘early’ for me (I keep finishing other races feeling like I need ‘10 more yards’). Here I come up to the line, tick, now I’m 3rd. tick, now I’m 2nd. can I get 1st? It doesn’t look like it and wammo 4 riders come up behind me. No!!! Two caught me in the end, but I kept going strong and ended up with a solid 4th. Man I was NOT going to lose it then!
Lessons learned – listen to your body. Man did I feel tired!
Ignore your body (well, sort of!) – Even if your tired, race solid, keep it safe.
And finally, keep working on this positioning stuff – and shoot for 1st next time! And a prime wouldn’t hurt!
:)
Aiyana