Along for the ride

I can't believe how I lucked out this weekend. I heard that Jake Weber needed a female teammate on Thursday @ 4 p.m., on Friday @ 4 p.m. I was dropping my kids off at my mom's (miraculously her schedule was open) and heading off for Fruita. I got to the camp site at 10 p.m., Jake and his friend, Bill, took me out for a night ride on the race course. I thought I was doing fairly well, considering I haven't really been on a mountain bike trail for...hummmm...10 years. Jake was biking slow, "not race pace" as he called it, and kept telling me what was coming up on the trail. Apparently just as he was about to say "and that was the end of the first technical part" he hears my first crash. In fact, I crashed on each of my laps (fortunately missing the cactus each time). Jake was hoping I would take 45 min on each of my laps, I hit 48 & 46. I could have gone faster if I could have avoided the crashes and if I wasn't so nervous about letting faster bikers pass me (I pulled over too eagerly, but they were all so nice and courteous). The guys on my team were such good racers, so fast and so very competitive. In spite of that, they were eager for me to get in as many laps as possible. They even wanted me to take the last victory lap if we had a big enough gain on the #2 team (we were in 1st place for the entire race, there were 16 other teams in our division). That would have meant I would be pedaling up the last big hill, with a huge crowd of cheering fans, as the clock was ticking. Fortunately for me, there wasn't enough time for me to do that last lap (that last hill had some hair pin turns that I never made it through without unclipping and walking a bit, embarrassing). It was so so much fun. No pictures of me riding, tho. I just couldn't work up the nerve to ask one of the guys to take my picture. Then my parents kept the kids for me all day today and I was able to get to another ward's sacrament meeting (I missed ours because I didn't get home until 5 a.m., I had to pull over to sleep for a few hours), unpack, and take a 2 hour nap. A dream come true, really.