Waka-Roc Twin Dams 2009

125 km | Putaruru and surrounding area
www.wakaroc.co.nz/pagefiles/twindams.html
Time: pending
Category Placing: pending


This was.. interesting. Actually it sucked. The course itself was pretty nice, but me, I sucked.

A spur of the moment decision last night saw me dressing up my wheels in a pair of hardly used Michelin Pro Race tyres. It wasn't till I was doing some last minute embedded glass checking before the race that I noticed a 6-7 mm slash in the front tyre. Faaarrrk! I hastily whipped off the tyre and patched the offending spot with a Park Tool adhesive tube patch on the inside of the tyre, just for safety's sake.

But the tyres ended up being the least of my problems. In fact they roll pretty nice. I think I'm going to use them more often.

So the riding.. The race split into 2 bunches at about the 25 km mark. I was in the second bunch but fairly confident of catching up with a lot of the riders ahead once we got to 'the hills' (which, by the way, were not what they should be according to mapmyride.com. Lies, lies, lies!). As it was, that never happened, but I think there were only one, or two at the most, girls who didn't get dropped from that front bunch.

I rode with mostly the same bunch up until a cluster of small hills that I couldn't resist having some fun on and as per usual left the rest of the bunch somewhere 'back there'. After that I rode solo till I caught up with two girls on another hill and on the descending side we were caught by my old bunch and a couple of other girls who I had passed on the hills earlier. I stayed with them up until the biggest hill of the day (which isn't that big, maybe 2km max albeit quite steep) where I couldn't help but just go (a lot) faster up it. I had it in the back of my mind that I'd go up at the same pace as the bunch but I was finding it much, much harder to go slow and not have any rhythm in my legs, or something!

I managed to keep that group of riders at bay for a lot longer than I had anticipated. It was about this point (I have no idea where I was, it must have been somewhere between 70-90 km) I realised there was no way I was going to be able to comfortably ration the remaining 750ml bottle of fluid I had left (there was no water stops anywhere on the course). I was reluctant to eat anything for fear of further dehydrating myself. Those 2 things were I guess the reason everything went downhill from that point on...

One minute I was feeling pretty damn good at my stellar (possible delusional term of word) breakaway on that hill, the next I was lethargically churning the pedals just to keep from stopping. And not sweating. That freaked me out a bit. After that point, and to the end of the race, things just slowed, and slowed, and slowed. I got passed by what felt like everyone (but lucky for my ego wasn't) and could not think straight at all to the point where I was actually having immense difficulty calculating how many km's to go..! I have pretty much no recollection of the last 20kms, apart from three elite riders who yelled at me for not being far enough left and and salivating at the sight of an old, half full water bottle on the side of the road in my glue-mouth dehydrated state. Fun times.

So yeah. That's the gist of that. Pretty disappointing really. Much hateful vibes toward useless body parts right now. My speedo post-ride reads an average speed of 30 km/h which isn't too bad but could have been so much better! I've never bonked so radically and as spontaneously as that. I don't really know what went so drastically wrong because I've had worse days, much worse days, nutrition/water wise.

One cool thing, post race some riders who were in my bunches told me I was superwoman on the hills and one guy said he'd never seen anyone climb like that. That was a bit rad.. if only my efforts weren't inevitably futile!