Friday, March 27, 2015

New Racers (A photo recap)

It is hard to believe that the off-season has already come and gone and I am about to leap into my season! 

This winter and spring has been great and I have enjoyed my time getting out with a bunch of young athletes.  From high school racers right down to some 5-yr-old triathletes. As I mentioned before there is a great local race series to get up to speed for the season. One of the things I enjoy about these races is racing alongside a bunch of the high school athletes. The earlier of these races work well for the high-school athletes leading into their main races of the season as well. It is so fun to race with them and see how they progress.
Racing with fast high schoolers at Granite Bay

For the second season I have volunteered as an assistant coach for Tri4Kids. This is a local Triathlon club done by TBF that targets kids from 5-14. We have some monthly workouts and TBF puts on a series of kids triathlons throughout the summer. I started doing it after my daughter decided she really wanted to do a Tri at age 4. However, she tends to only want to race at this point. It is fun to teach kids the basics and see them get excited about health and sport!
Bike clinic with Tri4Kids

Folsom Bike in conjunction with Cycling Development have put together a junior MTB program for 8-14 to get them some mountain biking skills before they get to the high school level and join those racing programs!  This has been a lot of fun for me because I love to play in the dirt and I love seeing these kids getting into and pushing their skills a little more each time!

Jr MTB with Cycling Dev & Folsom Bike
 



XTERRA/Ride like a Girl
Something else I love is getting more people and women in particular involved in XTERRA! I have noticed that there seem to be a lot of women doing triathlons and a fair amount getting into mountain biking but as soon as you put the two together the attendance goes way down as evidenced when I raced the Dirty Duathlon! All of the time I get into conversations with people about XTERRA and how they would love to do it. It seems there are a lot out there who want to, they just need a little extra boost to give them the confidence to dive in and do it.

This past weekend Sian Turner came down from Truckee and joined me in leading a women's XTERRA clinic and preride for the XTERRA Real triathlon that will be held this weekend the 28th. We had a great group of ladies come out and we took our time going through the trails. Everyone seemed to push their limits just a bit and ride more confidently than before. My hope is that they all took away something from the clinic. I know I had a good time!

Also, thank you to those who supported the clinic! We had some great raffles too! Folsom Bike, Osmo Nutrition, TBF Racing, and Massage Vudoo. Also, Sian for her help and some Luna bar snacks from Luna Chix!

XTERRA Ride Like a Girl Clinic


Now it is time to get to business! Tomorrow I will kick out the cobwebs in my first Xterra of the season. Here we go!















Dirty Duathlon

It is so great to have a local race company that hosts some great early season events. TBF Racing puts on a MTB series through the winter, and I have enjoyed having these early season races to kind of work my legs into race shape and have some hard workouts!  Most of the races this season were great but I also got one that started pouring rain right on the startline! That was a wet 2-hrs.

In late February I went ahead and did the Dirty Duathlon out at Granite Bay. A great way to test out the running along with the bike. 

 It was great having some teammates out there racing as well! Things didn't start off too bad on the run. I wasn't feeling awesome on the day in general but it seemed to be going alright until after looking very closely at the arrows I ended up on the levy looking down across the parking lot to where I knew I was actually supposed to be running. A few young guy were right behind me and I said something about us needing to be down there. They chose the rock hopping puddle mucking to get over there while I chose to just run out the levy and down into transition. Sometimes you just roll with the punches, thankfully no big deal for me it added about an extra .2 of a mile. Bike went alright nothing special course was in good shape just damp and then the run again.... I definitely didn't have the same run speed on the second go but I did feel that I was able to pick a strong pace and hold which is something I am working on.

Turned up a win and 10th overall.  Not a bad day.