Nationals and Beyond

Alisha says: The latest adventures include traveling to Augusta, Georgia for Nationals and then meeting up with Dave in Colorado where I did some training while he attended and presented a paper at a conference in Boulder, after that we had a fun road trip through some of our favorite places on the way home to roasty toasty Tucson.

It was fun to meet up again with the team for some racing. I raced the criterium and the road race. After coming off of a rough month of May I was not particularly looking forward to the crit because I really didn't want to get dropped. It was a flat 6 corner crit that started at 8:00 pm, so for the first 20 min. we had the sun directly in our eyes on the start/finish straight and then it proceeded to quickly get dark. The good news is that my leg was cooperating and I made it through the at times sketchy race. Our youngest teammate Jackie finished 9th.

We were very lucky to have some cloud cover for the road race, it was still hot and sticky but at least we didn't have the sun beating down on us. Unfortunately we missed a break and so we had to do some work with the NOW team in order to bring it back, but I finally felt good again in a race and didn't mind doing some work. The last lap was really fun and fast. I goofed with positioning coming into the final kilometer and was to far back. I finished 17th.

I flew into Denver where Dave picked me up. We did some camping in the mountains above Boulder before Dave's conference. While Dave was attending his conference I was lucky and got to do some riding with teammate Kasey. The bad thing is that there were several large wildfires in Colorado and as a result a couple of the days the mountains were hidden behind a haze and the air was smoky, not the best for exercising in.

We road tripped home and spent a little time in some of our favorite places, Ouray, Silverton, and Durango. Our first stop was Black Canyon National Park, it is a very impressive canyon. We then did a little hike in Ouray and the whole time I couldn't stop saying how scenic it was. We camped out in the high mountains and the next morning drove into Silverton and ate breakfast at a small cafe. It was really fun because there were a couple chatty locals we visited with while eating. One local suggested we go on a mine tour so we went and toured the Old Hundred mine and learned about mining in the old days.

Jen and Kasey riding around Augusta

Crit racing

Dave brought his 29er and I had my road bike so we found this hard packed dirt road for both of us to ride.

We rode Rollins Pass to Moffat Tunnel 

Kasey was my tour guide around Boulder. We rode Sunshine Canyon, Four Mile Canyon and visited Skratch Labs.

Black Canyon National Park

Hiking around Ouray

This was part of our hike

This let to a cool waterfall

The little cafe in Silverton where we ate breakfast

All ready in our rain coats and hard hats for the mine tour