Here it is, finally, the Tour of Bright. I have been crossing off the days on my calendar waiting for this event to come around and finally it has! I travelled down yesterday on the bus with the majority of the crew who were at the ACTAS camp the week before. It was a long ride and it felt good to finally get out and stretch the legs on the bike. I have to admit, that I felt shocking and was very nervous about how my legs would feel come race day! I was sharing a cabin with Vicki, her husband Dave and Chloe at a local motel. After our ride, Susie, mechanic extraordinaire, tuned our bikes and gave them a clean so we were all set for the weekend of racing ahead of us!
The first stage was an early start, 8am, from Ovens to Bright. It included some climbs such as that over Towanga gap and for the boys Mt Beauty. I lined up along side riders such as Vicki, Bridie O’Donnell, Kathy Watt, Carlee Taylor in A Grade Women (after being originally put in B Grade which did wonders for my self confidence lol ). The first part of the race was pretty relaxed, it was like we were out for a Sunday stroll! And then as we hit the base of Towanga Gap (with just over 20km to go) Vicki hit the front and set the pace up the climb. Slowly but surely riders started dropping like flies until there was a group of about 6 of us including Vicki, Shara Gillow, Lisa Jacobs, Carlee Taylor, another fellow Canberran Bron Ryan and myself. We lost Bron at about 2km from the top of the climb and Carlee, Lisa and myself dropped the wheel when Shara attacked just under 1km to the top of the KOM with Vicki in tow. Vicki and Shara managed to hang on to their lead finishing 1st and 2nd respectively whilst I won the bunch kick form Carlee and Lisa to finish in 3rd spot just over 1min down. I was pretty stoked with the result as I would never have predicted anything like it! My main goal was to try and hang on to the girls for as long as I could on the climb but to cap it off with a podium finish in one of my first races as an Elite Woman felt pretty awesome to say the least! It was then just a matter of getting some food into me (nothing hits the spot like my banana bread oatmeal :P) and having a good cool down to prepare myself for the race of truth: the ITT.
for full results of the stage:
http://www3.your-sports.com/details/results.php?lang=en&page=6&eventid=1402&contest=7&name=Stage%201%7CStage1%20GC%20RESULTS&CertificateLink=1&format=view
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