Meltdown

The Whisky 50 is one of the coolest race weekends all year.  Friday night it started off with a bang in downtown Prescott Arizona as the fat tire crits took place in front of a huge crowd’s in the beer gardens.  The 1 km course, at mile high and full of steep climbs is one of the most suffery courses we will see all year.  Having seen the elite girls race go for a $100 prime on there first lap I readied myself to go for early glory in the 12 lap race and then fade away and rest up for the 50 miler on Sunday.  I smoked the first lap and had a good 40 ft lead  and then went up in flames on the next one.  Unfortunetly for me they decided to make the $100 prime on the 3rd lap of the race.  Not a winner move for me on this one.   The rest of the crit was fun to watch as the Elite mens field disintigrated from 87 starters down to around 20 finishers by the end.

Saturday:  Pre-ride with the rest of the Kona squad, Barry Wicks, Kris Sneddon, Spensor Paxson, Wendy Simms, Alice Pennington and our friend Sue Butler.  Nice 1 hour ride on some of the sweet singletrack surrounding Prescott.  This area of Arizona is one of my favourites  as the high altitude provides some relief of the desert heat and there are small mtns and pine forests all around the friendly 40 000 city.    The legs felt good during the pre-ride but I had a nasty cough from the night before which I was hoping was just an over exertion cough from the flyer the night before.

Sunday:

Sunday was race day.   It was forgetable.  It was one of those days in which you were further off ahead when you were still lying in bed than after a full day of trying to make something better of it.  You never plan it this way though and you never know if you don’t try.  It makes you ponder the meaning of life sometimes and puts things in perspective that we really don’t need to always be striving to be better or someplace else, once in a while its ok to just sit back and let things be.  In my mind I had images of ripping peoples legs off on the race and then hosting a cheque worth a couple grand over my head.  Instead I got worked over like a calf during the process in which they get branded, castrated and de-horned all in a blink of an eye.     I would’ve been faster if I had sat on my ass  watching tv and eatingDoritos for the last 3 months, rather then training 20-30 hrs a week and eating rabbit food. 

The race did go  better than last year when I crashed at 40 km/hr into the desert rocks and came away not only with a rough result but injuries to go along.   After 3 months of solid training, probably some of the most consistent training I’ve ever had, I figured the legs would be on fire for a race course which suited my ability’s so well.  Only problem was that the legs were MIA.  Not sure where they went but gettting to the start line was a mission in itself.  The first 30 minutes I fought off getting dropped by the group as we rolled out of town on a gentle paved climb but I could only fight it off so long.  2 hrs into the race I could hear the girls (who had started 10 minutes behind us) lead moto coming up from behind.  I did all in my power to avoid getting chicked, and failed miserably as I got chicked twice, and then passed by a couple  of fat guys in baggie shorts with backpacks on.  It was not memorable.   ‘I”m pretty sure I go harder on recovery rides.  What causes these days is a mystery to me but thankfully they only come around every few years.   After the race I got the MIB (Men in Black) to flash my eyes with the little stick which makes you forget everything that just happened and then flew back to Canada to regroup.

On a more positive note here is a movie from the 24 hrs in the Old Pueblo which was just posted on the Kona Cog