Andorra, Synonymous with Beautiful!

We made it, with pretty much no problems at all! :) We got to Barcelona with no problems. Melissa´s aunt met us at the airport helped us load all of our stuff into a rental car and her car and off we went to the land of many, many tolls! Everywhere you drive over here, you have to pay tolls! At least they take credit cards. We hung out at Gina´s house (seriously, her house is 50 feet from the beach!! We´re going back there after the race for a couple of days!!) for a few hours waiting for Jaymie to get here and then we made our way up to the race in Andorra. It was a really beautiful drive. I drove up with Melissa´s mechanic, Keith, and we had quite the adventure getting pretty lost and trying to find food and having every restaurant we tried to go to be closed, must have been a holiday or something?? We went to one place thinking it was a restaurant, and it was a ballet studio. Uhhhh, duhhh. We´re idiots with about 20 Spanish words in our vocabulary between both of us!

After many wrong choices at roundabouts, we finally met back up with Melissa, Gina, and Jaymie and got all settled in. This is one of the most beautiful countries I have ever been to! Yesterday was the start of DH and 4x practice. Apparently the DH track leaves a little bit to be desired with technicalness, but it seems they´ve made up for it on the 4x track. It´s huge, steep, and FAST! I was really struggling yesterday, but I´m hoping that it´s just that I was so tired I couldn´t think straight! Today is a gorgeous day out, so hopefully the mud will dry up and I´ll have a great practice and qualifier!

Sorry for no pics, but the computer I´m on has the CPU all locked up, so I don´t have anywhere to put my jump drive with pics on it. As soon as I can, I´ll post some up, though. It´ll be worth the wait, I promise! :)

2nd at National Champs!

Yesterday was the National Championships for 4x. We raced the same track that we raced on Saturday, only it was a little bit drier, and there were a few different girls racing. I had a good gate and a crappy first straight/corner which put me out of range of trying to stay with Melissa Buhl. I just rode a conservative race at that point to make sure I didn't screw up anything and miss out on 2nd place (like the night before!). Overall it was a good weekend of racing 4x. I decided to skip out on DH today and headed home last night so I could get some school work done before heading to Europe tomorrow for the World Cup race in Andorra next weekend!

Sorry about no photos, but it's hard to take any when you're racing! :) I'll post some if I find some online later on.

4x at Angel Fire

Today was the first of two 4x races this weekend. It was the MSC race. I qualified 2nd and ended up third thanks to pulling out of my pedal in the third berm. Dumb. Anyway, Melissa killed it for 1st, Jessica Vogt in 2nd, me, then Steph Hatalsky. For the guys, Petr finally pulled in the "W" he's deserved for so long, behind him was some guy i have no idea who he was, then EC and House (can't remember in which order). Unfortunately, my good friend TJ had a bad mishap at the end of his run and picked a big fight with the lip of the last jump on the track, knocking himself completely unconscious, and not sure what else yet, haven't heard the verdict from the hospital. So glad his neck/back are okay, as the spectators that saw it said it was a really bad head plant into the dirt. His moto helmet that's broken into 4 pieces on the inside can probably attest to this as well. Send him lots of healing thoughts!! :(

The DH track was a mess today, completely frozen with a nice coating of ice on the extra-long -fo-this-year rock garden, that turned into mud by the afternoon. Boo, I'm not a fan of riding DH when it's like this. Bad memories of separated shoulder here in similar conditions a couple of years ago. Anyway, the weather seems to be much nice for tomorrow and Monday, so hopefully it'll dry out and be nice!

One more 4x race tomorrow, the national champs, so hopefully that one will go a little better!

So, I made it down to Angel Fire yesterday about 4:00, just in time to register and rush up to get a few 4X runs in. It was a bit windy, but the course had some good (and a couple not so good) changes in it, so it was fun to work on that. Luckily James (my roomie) rode down with me, as I was TIRED and probably would have fallen asleep otherwise! It's been a really rough week, for a lot of reasons. I want to feel rested and focused for this race, it's a big one, and a World's qualifier, so...hopefully I can get my head on straight, very soon!

I'm at the library here in Angel Fire working on school stuff right now, as it's SNOWING and sleeting out. It's pretty cold and miserable, and I'm not so much in the mood for slipping, sliding, and inevitably falling all over the many, many rocks on this course! I'm gonna hold out and hopefully 4x practice will be a bit warmer and not sleeting...looks like the course might be a mess, though, there's been quite a bit of precip. :(

Hopefully the weather just continues to get nicer and nicer as the weekend goes on! :)

Ahhhhhh

Well, another birthday has come and gone, and with the exception of 9 hours of work yesterday, it was a darn good one! Boulder is such a little-big place. On my bike ride home from school, I saw two people I knew who also knew it was my birthday, so it was like a birthday wish serenade at the busy intersection! :)

I always like to try to do things that I love on my birthday, and yesterday was no exception. I slept in (sort of mandatory after a bout of insomnia till 4:30 in the morning to ring in the day), I had strawberry rhubarb jam (and lots of it) on my toast (thanks mom), lunch with friends, awesome (even if too short) dirt jump session, amazing dinner, and then beers at the Southern Sun with 20 great friends!! The day was only missing a few of my favorites, including a nap! haha I might have to make up for that today!

I'm off to Angel Fire tomorrow for some 4x and DH racing. Then I'll rush home on Monday night and reorganize the stuff for a 10 trip to Europe! Wahoooooo! :)

Until then, though, it's back to the grindstone in the lab. Boooo!

Tweety Bird Sucks!!

Well, at least the bird that was tweeting outside my window at 4:45 this morning does! Ugghhhh! I love sleeping with my window open. In fact, I think I left it open all the way till the day after Thanksgiving last year. This damn bird outside my window is gonna have to go, or learn to sleep in because I'm not into getting up at 4:45, ever!! In other much more exciting news for the day, it's TJ's 21st birthday...FINALLY! haha HAPPY BIRTHDAY TJ! :)

Congratulations...

are in order!! My friends Bama and Tanesha are gettin' hitched! :) Wahooo! It's gonna be a party!

Flying By

The tiny little country between France and Spain...Andorra

May is already flying by! I think I'm pretty much over the stupid sickness that plagued me last weekend, thankfully! My experiment (the BIG ONE) seems to be going fairly well so far. At least my cells are mostly still alive, that's always a plus. :) The first world cup race is this weekend in Maribor, Slovenia. There are 295 men registered for DH and 114 for 4x. That's just crazy!!

I bought my ticket to the World Cup in Andorra at the end of the month! Wahooooo, can't wait. :)

Gated Racing Galore, Cough Cough

Jess, Lisa, Joanna, and me on the Dual Slalom podium

This past weekend we were down in Nathrop at the McMurry Ranch for some 4x and DS action at the first round of the Mountain Sates Cup. Normally this is one of my favorite weekends of racing of the year, given that it's a weekend full of nothing but gated racing, but... Friday found me starting to feel really under the weather, and it only got worse as the weekend went on. :( I felt as I imagine chronic smokers must feel. After a single practice run (or sometimes just 1/2 a run) I could barely breathe through the wheezing crap in my lungs. Ah well, ya gotta make the best of it right?

Girls Gone Wild Weekend...haha Just Kidding!!

After being an idiot and accidentally taking the daytime cold medicine before bed on Friday night and wondering why I couldn't sleep, Saturday was off to a great start. haha Saturday was 4x day, and the day's event went really well. The Ranch is setup with two start gates running off of the same cadence box. Super cool! 8 people in the start gate at the same time snapping onto the two different 4x tracks! Good fun!! 4x racing was very uneventful for me that day, as I didn't have the energy or snap to make it much of a race with Joanna and Bobbi Kae (straight out of gated racing retirement!). Got third.

Sunday was gonna be a long day! Dual slalom always takes FOREVER! (just one more reason why I like 4X more than DS, haha). We got started with practice at 8:00-9:30 and then qualifying at about 10:00. The beginners/sports raced first. (insert bang head against wall repeatedly while sitting bored out of our minds waiting.) :) Then we had another 15 minute practice session right as the wind was picking up, yea! Finally around 3:00 or so, the boys started their round of 32, and we kept waiting, patiently. :) We finally got to race around 4:30 once the guys' fields were all down to the rounds of 8. My first round went smoothly, and I won both races easily. After that I had to race Lisa, who is a slalom master, and I didn't have much energy left to make it much of a fight, but I gave it all I had. She got me on both courses and moved on to race Joanna in the finals. I raced Jess for 3rd and 4th, and had a good couple of races to take another 3rd.

The CO Gravity Girls Club: Jess, me, Lisa, Joanna, Bobbi

Overall a good weekend, minus the coughing and crap coming out of my lungs! :)