Heat, Sugarsand and Speed

If I were to choose three words to summarize last weekend's state championship course at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, they would be: Heat, Sugar-sand, and Speed.
In my category, Women 4, there were four other racers for me to compete with, as well as the junior 10-14 group who was racing at the same time but being scored separately. I have to say, that on the start line I was the youngest women by a differential of at least 10 years. That can be a good or bad thing sometimes, but for this race it seemed to be my advantage.
On the first two laps, out of a total of four, I played cat and mouse with a lady who was wearing a green jersey and riding a mountain bike. (no I don't know what brand, that's for the boys to care about) She would beat me in the sugar sand and where I was forced to walk, but then I would catch and pass her on the road. On the second time over the barriers though, she was just ahead of me. In a split second decision to mental slow her down, I shouldered my light cyclocross bike and dashed across the barriers as fast as I could, arriving at the last one before she even finished stepping over the first. From there I time trialed a long section of pavement and hammered the sugar sand parts until I knew she would not be able to catch me. After that, I simply kept racing at the speed I had been before, quickly finishing my last two laps.
It was a long race, but a lot of fun. One thing that I learned from this race was that even though you may not be entirely out of physical energy, a mental hit takes away almost as much as having to chase down an attack.

This is also planned to be posted on the new colavita blog.

Colavita Website and Blog

I'm trying to write a summary of the past two race weekends but currently it is just unedited-train-of-thought. But in the spirit of getting our team websites out to the world (cue dramatic music) I'm happy to announce that Team Colavita Florida has a website and blog up and running now. Unfortunately, nether have much on them at this instant, but we are adding more every day. Here are the links:
www.colavitaracing.com
www.colavitaracingflorida.blogspot.com
Hopefully I will have my race reports also posted on here in due time. (warning: they may be rather long.)