Head Up! Allie Fifth at Nationals

By Allie Burch
Patterson, New York

Mike and I have recently moved to NY and thankfully it’s in a spot where I can start giving back some host housing. 

Kimber, Connie and Shannon Edson all arrived Wednesday evening, however Kimber and Connie were not allowed out of the plane until early Thursday morning.  I picked them up from the airport and around 1am the three of us rolled in to my driveway exhausted.

We started out the next morning building bikes and loading cars.  Shannon and Connie were to follow Kimber and me out, however when I pulled out of the driveway and made a right onto the road they were nowhere to be seen.  I swore they were right behind us.  There is no cell service where I live so we circled back around to the house retracing our 500-yard gain in search of them, but no dice.  They had disappeared.  That’s gotta be a record!

Shannon and Connie made their way to Vermont using her directions and a rental car map while Kimber and I relied on my impeccable sense of direction.  (HA!)  Surprisingly we made pretty good time, that is, until we got to the Mass/Vermont Border.

A good day starts with a good breakfast:

…Or brunch, or lunch and a snack, or gorging on impulse boutique foods at the Vermont state line.

Kimber and I made our way through the last bits of Mass and into Vermont as our tummies started to get a little grumbly.  Right at the state line, you know, where the road narrows and you can almost knock on someone’s front door while driving by, there sat an innocuous looking little country store with “pastries and deli” painted in the window.

We weren’t even all the way through the door yet and we both had our hands on freshly baked cookies the size of our heads.  There was every type of Vermonty maple delight one could imagine.  Maple smoked mozzarella, maple sugar, maple syrup, maple-fried-maple…it went on and on.  We grabbed a sandwich, I couldn’t resist a sampling of the maple pulled pork and we tugged each other the hell out of there before any more damage was done.   

Down low, two slow!

We arrived, but not in time for Kimber’s Super D practice.  Downhill practice was later in the day, so after registering, we took the chairlift up to walk the course.  It took longer than I thought an my legs started to ache already so I bailed out ¼ way down and hiked the fire road the rest of the way.  

I suited up for practice and I was so tired I nearly fell asleep on the chairlift ride up.  I took two slow runs in order to look the course over since I was just too exhausted to walk it and pick out lines this day.

Validation:

Friday’s practice was spent on two timed cruiser runs.  My arms were still ok, but I could feel the fatigue setting in.  I knew I was riding better and able to conserve energy by letting the brakes go in certain sections, including a very fast section of boney, pocked shale slab that was just a tad off camber.  This is usually not my style, as I don’t relish high-speed sections.

The bike bucked and skipped as my suspension soaked up all of the hits.  I felt the bike leave the ground and land again, only to skip over more shale-bone.  With every hit I thanked God for the Stan’s NoTubes guys and their strong wheel-building prowess. Clang!…Clang!…KAPOW! ……CLANG!  “ooh.  That sounded like a big hit I should probably check my air pressure when I get back to the pits.”

I headed down for a breather and to check over my bike.  I went to pump up my front tire, to which it’s response was, “HISSSSssssss.”  What the hell?  I looked down and saw the side of rim was basically folded in, however the Stan’s had sealed it enough to allow me to finish my run without realizing it was slowly going flat.

A couple of other good side dings made my eyes well up with sadness for my pretty new ZTR Flow wheels.  Upon further investigation moments later, Alex found that I had actually cracked the rim right in half.  At that time Mike from Stan’s walked up to our tent and had thankfully brought an extra set of rims I ordered.   “I guess this means that I’ve been going faster.”  And in an odd sense, the fact I was going fast and hard enough to break one of their wheels kinda made me feel validated as a racer.

I noticed later, there were dead rims all over the place.  I only cracked one where other people were going through two and three sets of wheels.  I guess they should have been riding NoTubes.  

Ice, Ice, Baby:

Saturday we were all feeling the effects of the rough long course.  We were bumped, bruised, sore and tired.  Since practice was held in the morning, we had the rest of the day to do what we wanted, which quite honestly for me was to sleep.  Kimber suggested that we head over to the condo for ice baths.  So, that’s what we did, each of us taking turns in the tub with our own bag of ice for seven to ten minutes of soaking in excruciatingly cold water.  YOW!

It’s a little ironic, a downhill team taking ice baths and foregoing a party (Vermont’s institution of the “naked crit”) to head out early to offsite host housing.  We then went for a relaxing swim with the dogs and friends in the Connecticut River.   The swim was not, however without the obligatory “stand on an inner tube in the middle of the river” contest.

For the Record:

After Friday’s…well, let’s face it, disaster in the slalom qualifier, and an incapacitating uphill footrace in the Super D, we, on the Velo Bella Downhill team were faced with the very real possibility that for the first time this year there might not be a podium appearance for us at a race.  It would have been so good to have a showing at the National Championships.  

I guess what “They” say about momentum carrying a rider or team because I don’t know what the hell happened during downhill qualifiers, but as I was laying on the ground at the tent wallowing in what I thought was a joke of a run, Alicia runs up to the tent with the shocking news: “HOLY CRAP!!! ALLIE, you qualified 4th!!!”  I was in no way prepared for this information so I let out my default response while rolling on the ground: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!”  But, there it was.  My name, in print right in between 3, Dawn Bourque and 5, Marla Streb.  Talk about a hero sandwich!  (They are two of my favorite riders from when I started racing)

At two-o-clock we lined up for the final in reverse order of our qualifying run with the fastest qualifiers in the back.  Marla looked back at me and gave me a “good luck!”  I cracked back, probably a little too eagerly and loudly, “You too!” It was obvious that I was nervous.  On a side note, I NEVER EVER thought that I would see the back of Marla’s jersey from the start block.  Usually, when I look back at the line of riders to follow me, she’s a little speck off in the distance of top three qualifiers.  Something horrific must have happened to her in qualifying, or she was just setting the bait with a slower time.

This time, I looked back and saw only three.  The very fast, very aggressive and very hungry Bourque, Pruitt and Buhl.  Holy Shit.  Remember the “Rabbit Chase” scene from the movie “Snatch”?  (Queue the music)

Marla rolled up onto the starting block but not before she said to me in low voice, “head up.”  We had spoken earlier and I explained that I had worked with her old coach Blair Lombardi this past spring.  “Head up” is one of the fundamental keys.  Just little things she does like that keeps Marla up on a pedestal as a class act.  (I still wanna grow up to be like her)

Then there were four.  I loaded into the start gate and to calm myself tried to make small talk with the official and give a big cheesy full-face grin to a guy taking snapshots, all without fogging up my goggles.  Well, it worked and I was off.  Down the right of the pocked ski run, staying loose over the steppy-steps, letting my bike work and flow under me while I hung on for dear life over my desired lines.  I knew my speed was good, yet I was confident – an incredible combination that I hadn’t yet been completely able to put together.  I tried to gauge my run by the spectator’s cheers.  When I nailed a difficult off camber  section, I heard a guy give a surprised “yeAH!”  I thought to myself, “Hell yes that was good!  You’re actually nailing this!”  I was then on to the high-speed “Wheel Crusher” section which I tried to stay loose and flow over, but somehow I got sucked into the weeds.  I thought I was going over but managed to pull the bike out and still carry a bit of momentum, but not enough to where I didn’t have to pedal like crazy into the woods.

I dove in as the course spotter blew her whistle.  (course spotters communicate via whistle blows, one blow=rider through, two blows=rider down, etc) Over the rooty places that caused me a bit of trouble, then as I passed another course spotter who blew his whistle, I heard another whistle blast from behind me.  “Oh my God!” I thought, “Dawn’s RIGHT THERE! She’s caught up already!!” New strategy – pedal like hell.  .  I had to basically do standing two-minute sprint intervals while maneuvering a nearly forty-pound bike.  Oh, it hurt so badly.  I forced myself to pedal in every single straight.  Up and over the rock-drop, landing with an “OOF!” pedaling through the woods where I could and then through the last wooded section where my smarty-pants husband was yelling, “C’mon!! GO!  Pedal! GO!”    “I’m going, I’m going!!!” I tried to huff back, but it probably came out more like “IGUuuuuunn..BAAARF!”  

The end was near.  The light at the end of the tunnel of trees to the glorious finish line where bottles of water and a nice place to lie down awaited me.  

“UUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGG…whimper” I’m sure I sounded like a hippo in labor as I pedaled through the fire road chicanes, but damnit I charged.  I gave 100% as I came through the finish line and I was spent.  That was a successful run and I was happy with it.  Although I could improve on my lines and some technical aspects, I gave it everything and that’s what I had expected of myself.  What I was not expecting was to hear “Allegra Burch with a time of blah blah blah sitting in third place!”  My brain was doing back flips while my body fell off the bike.  I tried to do the math. let’s see, I’m in third, there are three faster riders, that means the lowest placing I could get today = blue.  I decided just to sit there and see what happened.

Dawn came tearing through the finish, then Melissa Buhl lit it on fire.  There was now only the defending Pruitt who had taken the Stars and Stripes home last year…and she came down on a flat.  Just because Kathy had a flat, however doesn’t mean she still didn’t have a smoking time.  She could still claim a podium spot, however it was not to be.  She must have flatted at the very top, and there we had it.  The 2008 Pro Women’s National Championship podium:  Buhl (KHS), Streb (Luna), Borque (Rhino), Harvey (Sobe/Cannondale) and Burch (Velo Bella)!  As I’m writing this a day later I’m still kinda stunned.

Thus, we have continued to uphold our 2008 record.  Every single venue that one of the DH team members has participated in during 2008 has seen one of us on the podium for at least one of the events. 

Bittersweet:

My goal in the beginning of the year, before I knew we were moving across the country, was to accumulate enough UCI points to be able to race some World Cups.  Specifically, I wanted to attend the two in Canada, Monte Sainte-Anne and Bromont which followed the week after.  Since moving and buying a house put the financial damper on travel, training and racing, I scrapped it and focused on local stuff, which started going really well.

The podium spot at Nationals in itself gave me all the points I needed for the Monte Sainte-Ann and Bromont races the weekends after!  I could go!!!  Or so I thought. 

The reality is, the cutoff date for all points to be accumulated for either of these two events was July 8, 2008.  this means that the only US event where a gravity racer could gain UCI points was at Angel Fire, and since it was an E2 event, only a modest amount of points were granted.  Basically, you had to win in order to get enough points.  I could go to the last two World Cups in Australia or Austria, but I’m afraid with the price of gas, my car just won’t make it there.  😉

I’m not exactly sure how it all works, if points carry over or if I’ve just got to do more races in Canada.  I’m new to this World Cup thing, but now it’s a solid goal for 2009 and I’ve got a lot of time to ask questions, learn, plan…and get faster.

You can’t do it alone:

The support was awesome and so very very helpful.  Just knowing that I could bring my bike in and someone would actually help me fix it, or wash it or tell me to sit and put my feet up was invaluable.  Having a place to just sit for a while was key.

Morgan was our amazing and valued mechanic and Alex did the running, figuring out and cat-herding that is just mentally exhausting.  Thank you so very very much!

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