Wimbledon...I mean Lost River Classic

Oops, wrong sport.  What I meant was, this race actually elicited tennis player noises from me in the final sprint.  And although I brought my best Monica Seles (second best actually, but more on that later), I would never confuse the Classy with the Classic.  Let's look at the differences:

Wimbledon  vs. Lost River Classic

Ground Surface: Flat manicured grass vs.Chewed up asphalt+roadkill+hills
Customary Eats: Strawberries and cream vs. Clif Bars and VitaCoco given as podium prizes
Women's Attire: Mandatory all white + skirts vs. Choose your own spandex, provided it can get sweaty and dirty
Payout: 7-figure sum in British pounds vs. 3 digits worth of American bucks + aforementioned yummies (but hey, it's not the race promoter's fault that the dollar sucks, unless the race promoter is Alan Greenspan, but I digress)

Anyway, since I prefer the latter of most of those categories, I entered the Lost River Women's 123.  After winning the cat 3 race last year, I had high hopes for a result.  This was my first race since recovering from the 'Toona injuries though, so I tried to keep the expectations loose.  We took off, and Laurel immediately drilled it at the front of the pack.  I followed her cue and attacked on the long shallow uphill.  We quickly established a 4-woman break that lasted until the end.

I remembered the finish from last year being steep enough to be non-sprinterly, so I didn't give much thought to tactics.  As we approached the final 200m though, Mary took off like a rocket.  Crap.  I reacted slowly, finally whittling the gap down to a frustrating half bike length at the line, meanwhile uttering an awkward "Uhhhh!" as we sprinted to the line.  I've occasionally made such tennis noises in sprint workouts, usually on the best effort of the day.  In fact, the sprint+scream is so much faster than the sprint alone, that once I tried to improve my training by deliberately making the noise.  Turns out, however, that such things can't be faked, and the result was a meager sprint with an awkward little squeak.  So a spontaneous tennis noise in a race is an exciting achievement.  Another 2nd place finish though...well, I guess it could be an indication that the injuries are back to normal...