Prior to Nats there was only one TTT that we did with the four of us (Rachel, Mackinzie, Lizzy, and I) together. And it was in Bellingham over a month earlier. Looking back, there was a TTT where Mackinzie literally pushed me up a hill, a couple that some of the new girls gained practice riding with a combination of Rachel, Mackinzie, and I, one where I had asthma problems and didn't race with the team, one that Mackinzie and I did in the snow, and one where Lizzy ended up with a bad stomach cramp really early on. Yikes! That really wasn't an ideal way to go into Nats where we would be racing with teams that had most likely been racing together all year. Due to the ridiculously busy schedules that every student seems to have, we also didn't get in a 20 mile hard effort together before the race. The weekly TTTs during the normal race season are between 6 & 11 miles. 20 was going to be very different.
After doing some hardcore scheduling, we found a chunk of time in which we decided to practice turn-arounds since it was getting way too close to Nats for a hard effort. For maybe an hour we rode up and down the straight stretch of Valley Grove off of Lower Waitsburg heading West. While they were shaky at first and we were (or at least I was) a bit worried about how this was going to work once we were actually racing, the turns progressively got better and better. We talked through what went well, what wasn't going well, and how we could better communicate when we were turning, how fast we would slow before the turn, and how wide the first person needed to swing in order for the other three to come tight on the inside. As our turns became smoother, our smiles grew larger, whooping was louder and more frequent, and I could see confidence and excitement building up in every single one of us. We definitely brought that same whooping, smiling, confident butt-kicking attitude to Nats with us (along with our matching pink bar tape).
I'm not sure what it is about the TTT that I love so much. It is usually the race that I dread the most every weekend, definitely the one I complain about the most, but it is also often times the most memorable one. It's the time that your team moves together as a single machine - everyone communicating and keeping tabs on each other. It's the encouragement and the fact that no matter how tired or out of breath any of my teammates are, they can still manage to give a word of support to me as we rotate. I find that it is so much easier for me to push myself to (and past) my limits when I am with a group of girls that I know are counting on me, and I am counting on them.
I know that there are crits and road races that I just won't remember, but I think that I will remember every single TTT I raced this year - especially Nats (and not only because of the bison in the road). Those three girls are amazing and every single one of them worked their butt off. And the minute Whitney told us that we were second, all four of us broke into those same smiles that I saw on Valley Grove once we started nailing our turn arounds.
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| TTT start |
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| Our awesome "Serious Pink" bar tape :) |
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