Hardwood 8 hour report

And the air was just right for racing. Actually it was. Beautiful temp of mid 20's with sun. It was the normal morning routine and the car was pretty much packed and ready to go. Got to Hardwood around 9 giving lots of time to set up and warm up. Everything was going pretty good even though I wasn't to impressed with where the solo transition was. They had us off the course and this later on calculated into time lost and dropped me a couple positions.


Finally set up and get ready to warmup when I look in my bin. F$%k I forgot my helmet. I couldnt belive it. I'm anal about my setup and I forgot something so stupid. Lucky Hardwood has a bike shop so race down and bought another Giro. Atleast they had the same helmet. With all that time wasted I did'nt get much of a warmup and I didn't realize how crappy the route into transition was. If I had I would have had Mom and Ruth on the race course. Sounds simple and common sense now but at the time I was thinking to much of other things. I estimate it added 1 minute to every lap. We did start out on the race course but by then that was lap 10.

So sitting in the start line in the second row who rolls up but one of our favorite superheros. Shane and Brendan decided to be supeheros and were racing tagteam.



These 2 are extremely fast and even wearing the cosutmes still blast the fastest laps and topped all teams with a total of 17 laps.


They sent us off and I went out pretty hard but was feeling great. First lap just under 32 minutes and the 2nd was just over that. Things were really on track and paced into an 34 minute laps for mainting. Then things started to go a bit bad. 5th lap I started to get a few cramps but just kept pushing hoping to work through them. I backed things down a bit because climbing was getting a bit painful. There was zero places to recover on this course.

In otherwords NO place to get a stretch in. Well just keep going and deal with it. Of course the demons always come out when the pain starts saying aww just quit. I was battling for 3rd at this point but my pace contined to drop. At the 10th lap I hit the low and slowest lap but manged to pick things up for the last 3. The legs were really really mad at me and I'm still fighting some cramping.

The dramatic weightloss at the begining of the this week seems to be the logical cause of it. Monday morning I was down 6-7 pounds and was having dizzy spells. I had managed to gain a couple pounds back but you cannot recover that quickly with weight loss. Even with the cramping I was very happy with my performance finishing 7th in the under 40 and 9th overall out of 61 male solos.

Now on the good note of it all, I think the stomach issues are gone. No gut pain through the night. I was able to eat and drink with no problems and except for the legs I feel really good. I've done a round in the hot tub this morning and will be heading out on the road bike for a recovery ride very shortly. I'm still in decesion about the 9 hour next weekend. I have a masage this week and figure I will wait till the last minute to register. If the legs are feeling questionable or if the weight doesnt come back on smoothly I'll skip this race to make sure I'm healthy for the 24 in August.


Thanks to my Mom and Aunt for support. Can't do what I do without you guys there and thanks to Rob from Barrie Cycling Club for some awesome picutes.