Help - I Suck (long)

[SheFly]

OK. I am feeling really BADLY about my performance this week. After having an awesome early season racing this year, setting a PR on my TT effort, and upgrading my racing license, I feel I am moving backwards.

On Sunday, I went over to a local training race. It's a crit and is on a relatively non-technical 1 mile loop. Since there aren't usually enough women to race, we race with the men. I lined up for the "B" race (Cat 3/4) with a couple of my teammates, and we were off.

I am largely uncomfortable in crits in general, but racing with the men made me even more nervous than usual, so I hung in the back of the pack - not a great strategy since I had to sprint out of EVERY corner to just hang on. At one point, they announced a women's prime. I attacked from the BACK of the pack (there were probably 40 - 50 racers) to give a lead out to my teammate. That effort did me in, and on the next lap, I fell off of the pack.

Since this is a training race, you can wait for the pack to come back around, and jump back in at any time. Since I am not so smart, I TT'd for about 7 laps on my own. When the pack finally caught me, I managed to hang on for another two laps before falling off again. Again I went into TT mode, got caught by a breakaway (who I didn't even try to catch), and then managed to work with DH who was caught in between the two groups. Latched back onto the pack for another two laps, and fell off AGAIN. While I managed to finish all 30 laps, I was lapped twice, and worked mostly on my own. I was last. What was more discouraging was that my two teammates managed to stay attached for the entire race.

Last night, DH and I went out to our local TT race on the tandem. Last year, we set the tandem record on our course, which was beaten two weeks later, by 2 seconds. Last week, we came within 9 seconds of that time, despite almost being hit by a car . Our ride last night, in a word, STUNK. We went out, and I was pegged with the effort - my HR shows that it was between 180 and 182 most of the time. DH was getting frustrated because we weren't on target for a good time.

On the back stretch of the course, we got passed by someone who started behind us, and DH gave up. He was really angry. The hard part for me is that I get upset enough with myself - disappointing him just makes it all worse.

So, today I feel like I should just give up on the racing. I won't, but that is how I feel at the moment. There isn't joy in it anymore - it's work and there is too much pressure on performance and results. I want to get the fun back into the riding, hopefully before 'cross season starts.

Thanks for "listening" to me vent.

SheFly