Altitude and AZ Crit Champs through Marilyn’s eyes

Hello,

We are all just about to pack up our gear and head to Gila for a good epic weeks racing. I think it’s o.k. to speak for everyone when I say we are all really looking forward to this week.

I personally made the venture up to Flagstaff AZ to prep for this race. Allot of people have been asking how it’s been going up high in the last 3 weeks prep for Gila. I decided to do this because Gila is all above 6000feet. I’m lucky enough to have the kind of flexibility that allows me to move around and it’s been great.

I have done a ton of altitude training over the last 5 years. So I was familiar with how this would go for me and could avoid the risks and pitfalls one might experience if they have never experienced altitude. I can tell you the hardest part about altitude is adjusting your recovery. It is much harder to recover , so sessions that normally would take you 24hrs to recover from now take 48hrs. It also takes a few weeks to really adjust to being up high. 3-4 weeks for most. So the timing is perfect as I head to Gila.

I had some epic training sessions here. The weather is also much much colder up here so there were a few sessions up the local mountain where I looked like a staypuff lady on a bike panting away for hours.

In this block of prep for Gila I made the journey down the valley to the AZ crit champs with my team. My goal for this race was to help one of my AZ resident teamies get a win. I am Canadian so if I could be the worker for them and pull them to a victory I’d be happy. It was great tobe withall my teammates and have a break from the cold and lonely camp I was doing up high.

On a side note if there are any girls out there reading this who are thinking they’d love to try a crit but are just too scared, contact us!! We can teach you the basics and lets get the fields up in numbers in these crit races for the women!!

I would love to say we walked away with the top 3 places of the crit. But as we all know sport always has it’s challenges. The race stayed together for the 50min. On the last lap I had communicated to Mel I was ready to be her lead out chick. As we started to make our move in the final lap, crit racing would be crit racing and there was a huge crash in the final corner. Two got clear andthose were your top two placings. I got around it pretty quickly and came in for 3rd and then girls crossed in scattered after that. It was a shame to not have a good proper face off in a sprint finish to race for the AZ tittle. Our own Angie was our 2nd place girl, it was great stuff to stay totally clear of the crashing.

It is never fun to finish a race like that but that is part of sport.

So…next is Gila where we girls will be playing with fire in our pockets;-)

After the races….

Cheers,

Marilyn