As always, I walked away from another race with lots of fun had and many lessons learned.

(1) ALWAYS preride EVERY stage. I skipped my stage 1 preride because I thought I knew the trail. Turns out, the trail in the race wasn’t the one that I thought it was. I definitely paid dearly for it — fell of my bike three times during my first run on stupid things that should have been a breeze if I prerode the course.

(2) You’re not finished with a run until you cross the line! I had and AWESOME run on the last stage. I was fast, rode everything clean, but as I got closer to the finish line I started thinking “woohoo that was great, almost done!” and the proceeded to completely lay the bike out on the last berm. That bumped me down at least one place.

(3) Just because I have a crappy first run doesn’t mean I’m out of the race. I was feeling pretty lousy about myself right after, but during my transfer to stage two I overheard a little chatter and some of the other super fast ladies also screwed up on that stage. Lesson here is that sometimes we all have bad luck and I shouldn’t pull myself out of the game mentally because of one mistake.

Regardless of the final outcome, I’m happy with my clean run down “DH trail” and my 9 of 18 placement in a STACKED pro women’s field full of talented riders.