Sunday is it.
For a while I thought I wouldn’t be able to race because I wasn’t over my well documented crash in the Wildcat 50. It was tough for me because I have an affinity for the Hampshire 100 and wanted to finish five of them in a row. Especially with how rough this season has been for me I put a lot of emphasis on that as a goal. And it’s not that anybody else cares, but I do.
After the crash the responses I got were overwhelmingly supportive and ranged from “is your season over now?” to “I think you’ll be ready to race in two weeks.” Well ready or not I’m going for it, and I’m going to have some pretty well bandaged extremities to keep them from getting dirty and banged up. The idea of scraping my fresh skin across tree bark as I slip by is enough to make me nauseous so I’ll be bandaging to prevent that.
Coincidentally there is a cyclocross race being offered on Saturday before Sunday’s event so Carrie will be accompanying me down for that. It will be great to have some support even if it means the car will be stuffed to the gills and I will have less elbow room in the tent.
You may remember this picture of my “carbon” fairing for the roof rack. I’ve never fit the rack to the Speed 3 but I’m going to need it this weekend. Plan A was to borrow a roof box so luggage would go there and bikes in the car, but the Divide is such a big bike I’m not sure that would be very feasible. It was also quite a bit of work to get a box lined up so I opted to just run what I brung with the standard two bike trays. Of course I also realized this morning that I needed a QR15 roofrack adapter so I can put my bike on the roof and had to scramble to get one of those.
So some of this is last minute, but I also have my packing list for the even that I’ve been refining since 2009 and was able to print that out. Obviously I’ll be modifying the list to accomodate the additional traveler but I think that will be good in the end. The benefit of having her support both emotionally and with logistics to load the car on Sunday will be a huge asset.
Wish us luck- I’ll let you know how it goes.