Women's 4 Pesky Road Race Report

by Tracey

I promised myself that I would make time to write a race report for this one.....so here it is!

Woke up 4:20 a.m. Saturday morning-I am thinking to myself; "Why am I doing this? Oh ya, because it's fun! All I can think about is my experience last year with "Pesky"-my second race ever & nothing but suffering and the occasional "wow" this is beautiful! Get in the car at 5:00 a.m. and roll into Pescadero around 8:00. Throw on my clothes, jump on my bike and ride over to the registration. I immediately run into Angela & give her my extra bottle for the feedzone. I head for the bathroom and see another Bella-we introduce ourselves & she (Sarah) so kindly pins my number on while we wait in line. I get in about a 15 minute warm-up and we are off.

We cruise through town and then the race begins. A good friend of mine who races for CRC got the first prime-Cool! We all stay together up the first climb on Haskins. We hit the second hill and NorCal Tawnya is leading the pack. I see Mara (triathlete who won Berkeley Hills) start making her way up to the front-I go with her. We get on the front and as we reach the top we turn around and the rest of the field is a ways back. As we start the downhill a couple other gals catch up and encourage us to try to get a gap.

As we reach Highway 84 we are one big group again. As we are hammering into the wind on Highway 84 I am anticipating the Haskin's Hill climb-is it going to hurt as bad as last year. Right before we make the turn up to the feedzone the Specialized gal attacks-no one seems worried, we'll catch her on Haskin's. I see Angela and grab my bottle. Shortly after the feedzone, we make another right turn and start the Haskin's climb. I find Mara again and tell myself; "stay on her wheel". As we reach the top we finally caught the Specialized rider and I looked around and was thrilled to be the 3rd or 4th rider over the top. I see a couple of other riders behind me. Several other gals ended up catching up with us on the downhill and we ended up with a group of 9 riders for the rest of the race.

As we approached the "prime" a couple of gals duked it out and sprinted for the line with the Team Ritchey gal taking it. We all stay together over the Stage Road climbs and when we reach Highway 84 we decide to do a rotating paceline and take hard, short pulls. We all worked really well together, with a couple of the gals taking longer monstrous pulls-I had to dig deep to stick with them.

As we approached the turn up to the feedzone we saw a fairly large group of riders in front of us-turned out it was the women's 3 chase group. We passed them right before the feedzone. We started up Haskin's for the last time. My legs were feeling really heavy-a couple of the 3's passed me and I was not able to stick on Mara's wheel. I told myself; It's almost over, don't give up! I ended up finishing in 7th place and I was happy! What a great race-such beautiful scenery! I met some really great gals-many of whom I had not raced with this season-turns out many of the girls in our little group are cyclocrossers/mountain bikers(even an ex-pro mountain biker doing her first road race) or triathletes.

Thank you so much to Angela for cheering for me and feeding me and thanks to Sarah for the number pinning-great to meet you! GO BELLAS!

I am now looking forward to spending some time in Yosemite camping with the kiddos.