Ore-2-CHORE

Sara's arm after tangling with a guy at the start of the race. Incidentally, a front spoke snapped in the crash and she lost plenty of skin on her left leg/thigh, but I'll spare you the jpeg details.

Race start

Commentary:

The time has come for point-to-point races to have a separate women's start. MN and WI do it for the shorter races and Iceman pulls it off too. The current system of a men's race thrown in with some women is unfair for the women. Why? Oh, let me list the ways. 1) It is difficult to know where other women are with hundreds of men around
2) Women are competing for position against riders that are meaningless in their race(place wise) for the ENTIRE race distance
3) The men provide a great draft (as do the women) but since there are so many more men, if one of the women gets away with a great group of men, she can punch her ticket to the finish line if she can hang with the group.
4) Often times the guys that finish with the top women are stronger on the flats and sometimes the climbs, but cannot descend as well and slow the women down in areas they should be resting
5) Women get in the way for those guys battling it out for top 50 spots (even though these women may be fighting tooth and nail to see who is going to win the women's race).
6) The men's top finishers aren't disrupted by other bikers, so why should the women's be?

Even though Sara doesn't have much of an opinion on this topic, I certainly do. I watch the women's race play out every time I give feeds in these types of races. Sometimes the men in the race help her win or do well and at other times they cause her great difficulty.

That said, Sara is pretty happy with her day at Ore2Shore since she was able to catch up to Chloe and Jenna after going down hard at 20 mph. She obviously had good legs for awhile and but ended up blowing up around the halfway point. To say she is disappointed with her day is an understatement, but she's competed long enough to know it is only one race. The hard part for her is that she feels she had the legs to compete...

Great job to Chloe on the win and to Jena for nabbing second. Those two were way off the front and able to battle for the entire race which is quite an anomaly at longer races like this.