XTERRA Mountain Cup - Will

The XTERRA Mountain Cup was held in Beaver Creek, CO on July 18th. Yes I realize this report is super delayed, but better late than never... This race was race # 9 in 12 weeks and to say I was a little burnt out would be an understatement. Mentally I was completely toast. I've learned my lesson that there is such a thing as too much racing. With the coast to coast travel and hectic schedule of the summer, I went into this race just going through the motions.The interesting things was how well I did considering my approach to the race. I wasn't motivated to go hard and really hurt myself, when I knew that my fitness wasn't where I wanted it to be. So anytime things got hard, I backed it off (that will be the theme for the day).




With this approach, I somehow swam the fastest I have all year! My time wasn't anything amazing, but I was much closer to the guys in front of me than I normally am. Hhhmmm.... maybe I should not try more often?





As I started the massive 3000 ft climb up to Beaver Creek resort from the lake in Avon, I kept with my lack luster mentality. "This feels hard. I should back it off." The same as with the swim, maybe I should not try more often. Glancing behind me, I saw Brian Smith (http://wheresbrianandjennysmith.blogspot.com/) 20 or so meters behind me. "Here he comes, and there he'll go" I said to myself. But somehow, he didn't come flying by me as anticipated. I was holding him off!?! Brian is a uber biker and one of the fastest guys on the circuit. I was quite surprised that he didn't shoot past me as usual.

It wasn't until a long road section that he passed me and left me behind, but I was quite surprised that I had stayed in front of him for as long as I had. The rest of the bike was rather cruisy. As I said before - anytime it got hard, I just backed it off. Burping my tire on one of the technical downhills aided to my less-than-blistering pace.

The entrance to T2 was really fun because it was straight down a hill! I came blazing in so fast I almost ran into the fencing between the bikes and the spectators. I was in and out of transition so fast, that I didn't even have time to take my gloves off! A friend was just outside T2, so I tossed her my gloves so I didn't have to do the entire run with them.

On second thought, I don't know if I'd call this a "run." Anytime it got kinda steep, I would walk. And there was a lot of steeps. Anytime I got to an aid station, I would walk. And there were several aid stations.

As usual, I didn't see anyone on the run (other than Sport athletes). A spectator told me there was someone behind me with about a mile to go, so I did put in "a little effort" to finish things off (never did actually see the guy). I finished 10th and was a bit surprised that I did considering I wasn't even tired. Hhhmmm... maybe next time I should not care, but put a little more effort in, maybe I'll surprise myself again!