On The Pegs December 2019 - Volume 4 - Issue 12 | Page 112

On The Pegs 112 down my stocking cap over my eyes and start to visualize the race and obstacles. Because it is such a short race and there so very many ways things can go wrong, the few hours before my race have always incredibly nerve-wracking for me, in a way the pre-race jitters before other types of races are not. I don’t know if visualiz- ing does anything to help me race better, but it does help me deal with my racing emotions. Thirty minutes or so before the start, I drink some concentrated coffee (gotta love that east-to-west jet lag!) and take my ibuprofen to control the swell- ing in my bad elbow, then go back to visualizing. Saturday, 9:05 PM: I hear the official in charge of staging call for the Women’s Pro class. I jog to the bathroom one last time, hoping I won’t be late. I shouldn’t have worried – everyone else who will finish in the top four later tonight is already in there. I joke that if you ever need to find the Women’s EnduroCross class, just check the bathrooms. I get my bike up to the tunnel entrance just in time, and my dad/mechanic pushes it on through. This is the part of the evening that is always the worst for me, because I can’t lose myself in the trance of visualization the way I have been the last couple hours. The entire time I’m in the tunnel my stomach is busy trying to tie itself into Eagle Scout level knots. I know relief won’t come until the gate drops, so I just sit there and suffer. Saturday, 9:15 PM: The gate drops, and we all take off. Everything else I’ve felt all evening, the fans, the stadium, stray thoughts – everything but the track, riders and I vanishes with the crispness of someone changing the channel on a TV. I got a good jump, then all the sudden feel an impact coming from my right. One of the other racers hit me, in an attempt to cut across the track from the outside, and now our bars are somehow locked together. All I can think is “not again not again not again” as we both head for a massive log on a completely different part of the track. We somehow both stay upright and as she is forced over the log, break- ing the connection of out bars. I make the corner just in time to avoid going over the log myself. Despite the drama, I still had a mid-pack start, and by the third lap picked my way up into second. First place is long gone, so I focus on cleaning each obstacle and being smooth, rather than charging my way into a mistake try- ing to make up a gap that is too large to recover from in a seven-minute race. Saturday, 9:22 PM: The checkered flag waves and I pull off the track with a second-place finish. The real world snaps back into focus. I am suddenly aware of