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Norba National Finals The last race of the Norba series is finally upon us. It’s hard to believe the season is winding down. I started racing last September after coming back from shoulder surgery. I have been racing full on without a break since then and I almost can’t believe that the end of my yearlong season is in sight. Since Sept 2003 I have been to Europe six times, Ecuador, the east coast, the west coast, Texas, and all over Colorado. I will have raced a total of 59 times, all of them either cyclocross or mountain bike events. No wonder my body and brain are exhausted. Fortunately my fitness has somehow resurrected itself and I am riding better than I have for the past two months. I love racing in Colorado and Durango is always a great venue so I was looking forward to the weekend’s events. Getting there was another problem. I always forget how desperately long the drive is from Colorado Springs to Durango. It’s a beautiful drive, don’t get me wrong there, but after 7 1/2hrs alone in my Subaru I wasn’t smiling a whole lot. There is still construction on Wolf Creek Pass so delays there added another hour onto my trip. Luckily the weather was good and being alone in the car allowed me the freedom to sing loudly to my John Denver and Neil Diamond CD’s. I grew up listening to those guys so of course they are great road trip music. After sitting in the car all day I was looking forward to riding a lap of the course. It was almost 4:30pm and my other teammates were done for the day, so I went off by myself. It was a HUGE lap and took me 1 1/2hrs to ride. Sometimes I wonder why we race courses like this. It is painfully boring for spectators to only see the racers pass thru the start/finish area twice; once during the race and then when they finish. TV hasn’t covered our races for years so I won’t mention how insanely difficult these huge courses are for TV to try and cover. And for myself, when I’m at the far end of the loop and I haven’t seen a single person for over thirty minutes, I often wonder what the heck I’m doing out here. If I were to get gobbled up by a bear, no one would know for a heck of a long time. But such is the nature of our sport here in the US. The lap is quite challenging. Right out of the start/finish area the course climbs straight up the ski slope. And we’re talking at least a 20% grade. It’s the kind of steepness where you have to sit so far forward on the tip of your saddle to keep the front wheel down. It’s the kind of steepness where the only place you can look is straight down in front of you, for if you look up the hillside you fall over from exhaustion at how much more climbing is ahead of you. It’s the kind of steepness where spectators can walk along side you and end up getting ahead of you. It’s hard, extremely painful, and to top it all off it’s at 9,000 ft. After losing your lungs in the first mile, the course mellows out a bit. It still climbs but a lot of it is middle chain ring, which is much easier on the legs. After climbing for about 45 minutes clear around to the backside of Purgatory, the course finally begins to descend back to the start/finish. It’s a fun but rough descent. Lots of places to flat. Lots of places to go off course if you’re not paying attention. It’s a hard and challenging lap and only those riders best suited to suffering at high altitude are going to do well. We raced on Saturday at 1:30pm. The men started 15 minutes ahead of us. We were doing one large lap and one shorter, modified lap (thank goodness!). Our race started exceptionally fast thanks to Chrissy Redden and Willow Korber. But the altitude gods are never kind to fast starts and both these riders faded quickly once we hit the “wall”. My teammate Shonny Vanlandingham must have eaten an entire box of Wheaties because she went to the front and proceeded to drop all of us, myself included. I rode in second place for probably twenty minutes before being caught by Dara Marks. Shonny had disappeared in front of us so I knew she was having a good ride. I chose to follow Dara around for the rest of the lap. If she wanted to chase Shonny down I wasn’t going to help. She rode well and even hung it out on the descents more than I wanted to, gapping me by about twenty seconds by the time we came thru the start/finish for the second of our two laps. I quickly reeled her in on the “wall”, and then passed and dropped her. I rode alone in second the rest of the race. Dara never gave up and the gap hovered uncomfortably around 15 seconds. I held on and finished in second behind my teammates Shonny. It was a great day for Luna. The win gave Shonny the overall Norba title. I ended up second overall. Very satisfying. The next day was the short track. It’s always a challenge to recover from a hard effort while sleeping at altitude. Ideally I would have driven two hours to Cortez and slept at 5000ft instead of the 9000ft of our condo. But alas, I chose to avoid a logistical nightmare and stayed at our condo. Our plan of attack for the race was to work for my teammate Katerina Hanusova. She hadn’t won a Norba National and we wanted to give her a chance at all the fame and glory. The three of us led from the start. Within two laps we had dropped the entire field. Pretty cool. Then it was just a matter of working together and staying out of trouble. We all took turns setting tempo, with Katerina conserving most of her energy for the last few laps. She won, Shonny was second, and I finished third. That was enough to give me the overall Norba title, Shonny second, and Katerina moved into third overall. A very impressive showing for the “Blue Train” as they were calling us. It’s always fun to win and when you can help your teammates share in the glory it is extremely gratifying. Now it’s over the pond to Europe again for the World Championships in France. Until then, Alison |
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Alison Dunlap Adventure Camps, Inc.