Sea Otter

Heey,

So this is what has been happening my last few weeks, my host family went to Japan (how cool is that? family trip to Japan! Lucky Kids :) ) so I dog sat for a week, and then went straight from dog sitting, to cat sitting in Palo Alto. I have never had to look after a cat before...and to be honest they kind of creep me out a little. This one was called Oliver, he was very friendly, and he could open doors... when they were closed... apparently he has really strong biceps?!! Who would of thought!

This past week, Nor Cal has really started to heat up, the leg warmers and arm warmers all have come off which has been nice.

In between the dog and cat sitting, I did the Santa Cruz Criterium. This was a good warm up for VK before Sea otter, as for most of us, it was our first race back from being sick...and was our first race together with the team that we had lined up for sea otter. I ended up in 4th with Em in 5th.

Pre Santa Cruz

I went straight from Cat sitting to Monterey California to race the Sea Otter Classic. Monterey is known for its aquarium... unfortunately we didn't get a chance to go to it, but apparently the Jelly fish are awesome haha.

Sea otter was heaps of fun...a bit like zoo in a way, as everyday along with the racing there is a festival that thousands of people attend...was pretty crazy, and soooo American!

The stages went like this:

Stage 1: Criterium
We had an 8 am start...8AM!! Sooo early, I thought they had got the am and pm mixed up in the race bible....but no we did in fact start at 8AM! So up at 5 am...the earliest I have been awake all year!
The race its self though was heaps of fun! The plan for the team was for me to go for the intermediate sprints and try to win the sprinters Jersey, and for Emily to go for the Finnish. After the stage I was 2nd in the points classification ( 1 point of Alison Powers) and Emily got 3rd on the stage, so happy faces all round.

Jazzy and I post Crit

Stage 2: Road race
A bit of a later start today, 12pm, but also ment for peak hour of sun and heat...and it certainly got HOT!
The course was awesome, hilly and undulating. Jazzy and I were going to go for KOM points, but (hopefully my last bit of bad luck for the season) at the bottom of the climb when I was changing into my small chain ring, my chain dropped on the inside, and got stuck under my chain catcher, and then twisted. I couldn't pull it out, so had to wait for the neutral support to fix it. Once it was fixed the bunch was long gone, so my chase begin. After about 10km of chasing, the bunch was finally insight, and my team mate Bridie came back for me and dragged for a few km to finally reach the front group again. Once I made it back to the front group I was well and truly spent. Everything hurt, and my legs started cramping which was awesome.  I stayed in the front bunch for the rest of the day, until 1km to go when I blew. I had nothing left, and lost 5mins in 1km. crazy. I could barely even peddle. I was pretty annoyed with my race, as I was feeling awesome until I had to do a whole lot of chasing because of my mechanical incident...but hey that's bike racing, and I know I pushed my self to the limit.
I was also still 2nd on sprint points to Powers by 1 point.

Stage 3: TT
Seeing as I lost time in the road race, and I was not going to make up 5 minuets in the TT, Jono, our team director decided that it would be a good idea if I did not go 100% in the TT, to give my legs a rest day so that I could be fresh to try and win the sprints Jersey on the final day. So I did this, and my legs felt really good which was nice!

TT

Stage 4: Circuit race
This was a super cool Circuit, 4km around the race track with a hill and a cork screw decent.
I felt really good, and was loving the race. But unfortunately Powers and her  team were too strong in the sprints, so I ended in 2nd in the sprint points, and finished the stage in 7th

Circuit race

Now back in the bay area, ready for some more good training...still loving the roads around here, the training is so awesome :)

Hopefully ALL the bad luck it out of the way!


Kate :)