Monday, April 16, 2012

This scares the pants off me...or spandex chamois, as the case may be.

I'll be racing the Matrix Challenge in Dallas this weekend with teammate Chris Scully and a few guys from Team Type 1 elite.

As if the picture here were not cause enough for concern (can you say "ominous?"), it's made a bit more stressful thanks to a tight travel schedule. I fly in to Dallas on the 20th, and land late at night, around 10:55. I have to locate Scully and our rental van, and then head to the hotel for some rapid-fire bike assembly. (Heaven forbid we have a repeat of Phoenix, with the derailleur issues, because I doubt I will find a full service bike shop between midnight and our seven a.m. race time!)

After a short nap, Scully and I will be riding hard first thing in the morning! (Insert breathless panting here.) From there, we can grab a quick shower and some eats...and then head to an athlete appearance with my good friends from the Dallas Diabetes Health & Wellness Institute. (I had an earlier event with them a month ago alongside Bobby Heyer from the Tri Team and the Dallas Maverick's Street Team.) Eat, sleep, repeat.

Truly, I am super nervous about this race! I've been training hard the last few weeks...but crashed on a ride this weekend. I'm still nursing some road rash, a pretty tight right shoulder and two broken fingers. The course favors sprinters, with a couple of good corners but mostly long straightaways. Not awesome news for me. Really, this will be the kind of race where I hope to merely hang on, and not blow up on the backside of a sprint stretch.

Here's to hanging on!

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