2 April 2012  |  Race Reports

CLEARLY I Need To Practice My Free-Riding Skills: A World Cup Race Report

Now that several weeks have passed and my memories are fading, it’s about time for my race report from the first World Cup race in South Africa. So…I finished 40th. There were plenty of contributing factors (heat, lack of time on the MTB, bad legs), but the race was so spectacularly bad that I don’t even know how to describe it.

I had a decent start, but for some reason my legs were terrible. Women were passing me, and I could only watch because there was nothing I could do to stay with them. It wasn’t a question of trying harder, my body simply would not allow it. I was taking the “B” lines on a couple of the new course features- one was a drop followed by a small gap-jump, the other was a steep pile of logs that looked pretty terrifying. Having only a handful of mountain bike rides under my belt this season, I wasn’t exactly feeling super confident hucking my bike of stuff like that yet. It was a shame that the “B” lines were SO much slower that you were effectively out of contention for the win
(not that I had the legs to contend for the win), but I was willing to accept that penalty in order to ensure a clean race. My biggest priority was not getting hurt in the first race of the season.

So back to the race- it quickly became apparent to me that this would be a race that I just needed to FINISH. And believe me- based on how I felt during the first lap even finishing seemed like it would be an accomplishment. Well, I finished. And yes, I was very disappointed. My training has been going really well this year, and it was frustrating to have such a disconnect between my performance in training and racing. But there’s nothing I can do about it now, I just have to look ahead to the next races. It’s going to get better!

And I’m hoping that riding this:

And this:

Will help me to be awesome and ride like this: