Tuff Girls

All the best laid plans:

Original plan: road trip up to the Mt. Joy race. The event listed a 50+ mile race for 1-2-3 women. Unfortunately, our field was eliminated due to complaints from women in MABRA about the promoter not showing the confirmed rider list until a day or so before the race.

Maybe I'm missing something: traditionally, women are last minute sign ups for races, often showing up on race day to register. Even when promoters show confirmed riders, if there are only couple of riders signed up (as of yet), it can be counter productive because people won't sign up thinking that it's going to be a parade with under 10 competitors. I am not saying it's ideal, I'm just saying I get both sides of the argument. But, instead of signing up because we WANT to race, we give the promoter a hard time and wind up screwing it up for all the 1-2-3 women. How is that encouraging more women's fields ???

We complain that people don't offer enough fields for women, but then we torpedo the fields offered if they don't do it exactly as we wish. Yes, I know this particular promoter has had some issues, and yes, I realize that there are other pieces to the story, but I think I'm getting the general gist down ...It baffles me.

Alternate plan #1: the 7am. At 545am, while our Cat3s made the trek to a cold, rainy race, we barraged each other with texts and phone calls to assess the situation. Alternate plans were canned, raining too hard and too cold out.

Alternate plan#2: the 10am. At 845am, we continued the debate about the weather. Ever the optimist, Sonja (aka Rockstar) declared that it wasn't really raining so she was rolling out to make the 10am start. I ended the debate with Mitch by telling her I was in my car.

As we pulled into Rock Creek Park, Mitch's mom (MM) called:

MM: I'm on Braddock Road and just saw some crazy cyclist ... I just wanted to call -

Mitch: Hold on ... Hey Wendy, Mom just saw some craaazy cyclist on Braddock Road... (laughter)

MM: Oh. I was calling to make sure you weren't one of those crazy cyclists. Clearly I was wrong. Tell Wendy I said hi.

As we waited for the "10am" to roll through in the pouring down rain, Mitch and I were sitting in the back of my car. Fully dressed and helmets on, we looked at each other and asked "are we really going to do this?"

We almost - almost - gave in. Then Sonja came rolling by and saw our bikes. We climbed out of the car to hear that only two people showed up for the ride: Sonja and a hard-core NCVC junior. It made us all laugh at how none of the tough-guys showed up in this weather. Ha, we were tougher than the tough guys !!

By this point, none of us wanted to be the one who wussed out so off we went. We figured we were doing it in solidarity with our teammates racing in PA. Soaked within a few minutes but undeterred, we did repeats on the hill leading up to the Mormon Temple. Someone - I can neither confirm nor deny that it was me - mentioned coffee as our reward for being tuff-girls. The aftermath of the debacle is below - all smiles, so it couldn't have been that bad, right ?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Zim and Chicken wound up at my place on the way back from Lancaster - Chicken stuck it out for a 5th place finish in the race but was damaged by the wind, cold and rain. At Casa de Ulmer, you get full service for being tuff, including fuzzy socks and warm tea.
Talk about teamwork.