Holiday Valley

The Appalachian Series rescheduled the cancelled BX for this weekend at Holiday Valley, NY. It's about an hour south of Buffalo and about 6 hours from our house. Not ideal, but it worked out fine. The kind of weird thing was that the races were on Friday and Saturday instead of Saturday and Sunday. That's the only way they could fit it in. There weren't very many people registered to race and as usual, Whitney was the only one in her age group on Friday and on Saturday there was only one other girl. There were two races on Friday and two more on Saturday.

Friday

Friday was a beautiful day as it turned out. The nice thing was that even though we were staying about a half hour south of the resort, we didn't have to get up super early to get there since the registration time was later than usual. The course was way up on the top of the mountain so I didn't get to see her race this weekend. It ran with the usual format - course inspection and practice runs, riders meeting, time trials, then the races. There weren't many signed up so things moved pretty fast and they were done shortly after 1. The good thing about this race was that they had the same type of start gates that they use at Nationals. Whitney needs practice with those since the usual races she runs don't have any sort of start gate.

Even though there was no other girls in her age group, she did have someone to race with on Friday. There was one girl in the age group below hers and two older women (in separate age groups). The starters gave them options and they decided that Whitney and Paige (the girl in the age group below) would race together and the other two would race. It worked out well, especially since Whitney knew Paige from the last race.

Saturday

Today was not as nice as yesterday. Yesterday was close to 50 and sunny; today, on the other hand, was right around 32, snow showers off and on, cloudy, and around lunchtime, a pretty thick fog rolled in at the top of the mountain. It did thin out some, but stuck around.

There were a lot more racers today; the Western New York Series was also running a couple of races today. One of the girls in that series decided to race in our races today, so she gave Whitney some competition. The course wasn't as good as yesterday, I think the warmth yesterday softened the snow, then it iced over last night. So it was a bit faster, but not necessarily in a good way.

The races today went pretty well. Whitney said that she didn't speed check when she should have so went into the curve too fast and almost fell. That gave the other girl a chance to get ahead and Whitney didn't have enough real estate to catch up and pass her. The second race, she got a good start and lead to the finish.

After most races, they give out the medals (this season, they're special 25th anniversary medals), usually have raffle drawings for prizes from the national sponsors, and of course, give out plenty of Hi-Chew (another of the national sponsors). Today, Whitney was the lucky winner of a really nice Under Armor sweatshirt. These were the last races until Nationals. The invitations should start going out later this week or next week and we plan on being there!