North Shore

Today I carpooled up to Bellingham with two other Zoka ladies (it's awesome to have a few of us racing!) for the North Shore Circuit Race. I think this has to be the toughest course I've ridden since I started racing last year. Damn.

The women's fields were scored separately but combined for the start, which generally always sucks for the 4s. We did 32 miles across 4 laps that had over 2300' of climbing. Since the first big hill was part of the neutral rollout we got the joy of climbing it 5 times. I swear I went up that hill faster on the neutral rollout than I did the rest of the race. I really liked the course...there were two big hills, one small one in the middle, a few mile stretch of road that had a slight incline and headwind, and one fast descent. Pretty fun!

I lasted with the main pack about 5-6 miles, did a rotation on the front, then realized there was no way in hell I would last at that pace. I looked around and about 5-6 Cat 4s were left. The rest had already slid off the back. I looked behind me and saw 2-3 gals shortly behind so I dropped back to work with them. We stuck together the rest of the race and had a great group. One girl was very strong on the hills but didn't like descending. Everytime we hit the descent we thought we had lost her but she chased back on up the hill. She said it wasn't a very good strategy -- haha! On the last lap one of the gals dropped off and I tried to chase the girl who was wicked strong on the hills, but ended up finishing just behind her. I swear I've never been so happy to see a 200m sign in my whole life!

There was some confusion sorting out the 1/2/3s and the 4s and I still haven't seen final results yet but I'm pretty sure I got a top ten and was somewhere around 8th. Sweet! Suzanne placed 11th and Yumay unfortunately got pulled right before the finish. She did a fantastic job though and definitely picked a hell of a race for her first road race.

Unfortunately I had another round of nausea with this race, mostly afterwards. The entire drive home I kept feeling nauseated. After we dropped off Yumay, I was heading home with Suzanne and very nearly yacked in the car while driving on I-5. What a great way to impress your carpool buddies eh? Oh man that sucked. Afterwards I felt fine. I never get sick so I have no idea what's up. Once I looked at my Polar data I realized I spent most of the race (2 hrs+) in high Zone 4/5 so maybe I'm just pushing myself much harder this year. Whatever the reason I better quit before I get myself tagged with a horrible nickname like Chunks or something.