Originally Posted by Heathpack

Ok, and to update you on my racing drama.

To summarize the back story: I am of medium talent on a bike but am really good at focus, prep, and hard work. Which is the only way I can ever succeed. There is a grand total of one, count em one, TT on our USAC racing calendar all year in my district (Southern CA and Southern NV). So all my eggs for the year go in that basket. If I really prepare well, I can win it. If I don’t prepare well, maybe make the podium. I organize all my training all year around this one event, because I have no other events. Then they moved it up by 6 weeks from the expected date- expected based on logic (you want your State TT to be as close as possible to Nationals, so your district racers have an advantage at Nationals). And expected based on the date that’s it been for the previous 10-15 years.

So now in the time left, no way can I be ready in the way I should be ready. This move favors the 1%ers at the expense of the hard workers. Hence my primal scream of last week. Coach’s words were, “Yes, you are screwed. We can throw everything we got at this for the next 5 weeks and see what we can accomplish. You just have to decide if you can get over being pissed off about it.” And part of the reason I totally love him is: no judgement. He’s not telling me to not be pissed off about it or that I don’t have any right to be. Just that I’ll race better if I can let it go.

He’s right of course.

The impact beyond moving the SoCal State TT is that I was also planning on NoCal, Oregon and maybe Utah State TTs. The idea being that since I couldn’t make Nationals, I could put together my own Western Regional State TT series and see how many I could podium. Those other state races are in June, so it would have been great timing with the traditional midMay date of the SoCal TT- one peak for one 6 week period of time... but lots of driving.

Looking at it today though... if I cancel my trips to Carmel (March) and Park City (July) and instead take a week in April to travel to the Washington State TT, then a week in June to race Oregon and NoCal, and give up the idea of Utah (which hasn’t even published a venue yet nor responded to my email inquiries)... then I can race SoCal, NoCal, Oregon and Washington. Which would be the Pacific Coast State TT series. Pretty good.

Texted my nurses and my colleague at work (who was covering for me in March), talked to my spouse, ran the idea past coach and got all my ducks sufficiently in a row to say I have a new game plan. And now y’all know...