Pain Mountain

This past weekend was the Tour de Ephrata. It's a fun race. Well, at least, the road race was fun and the crit was fun. The Time Trial - aptly named Pain Mountain - was...well...painful. It would be inappropriate to call it Moderately Uncomfortable Mountain. Or A Wee Bit Tough Mountain. It is very accurate to refer to it as Pain Mountain.

Now, not being a particularly light weight climber, I was significantly worried about this portion of the race. Turned out to be my best placement of the weekend and helped to put me into the top 10 on the GC, which was cool. This is not to say that I rocked it. More fitting would be to say that I did a typical Porkchop move (some have seen this on the Wall climb in the past two years), where I sat my butt in the saddle and used every muscle from my heiney to my toes to power my way up most of the steep sections. I figured that if I stood up too much, while I might go a bit faster, I would blow out my quads for the Crit. Didn't want to do that!

In the end, I ended up 8th on the TT. At the end of the crit, I had moved from 14th in the GC after the Road Race to 9th! Kewl.

The team had a great weekend...we came together phenomenally in the crit and Arley ended up with a 2nd place finish and a 5th in the GC.

Overall, considering the stiff competition and the challenging courses, we had a great weekend to put two riders in the top 10!