I Made Worlds!!

The final points tally is in...and I made the USA Triathlon Elite World Champ team for 2007 in Hamburg, Germany! Race date is September 1st. Now it's time to get down to business!
Well, I've been getting ready for this race for quite some time...I took a nice mid-season break after the Pan American Games and I've been back in the full swing of training for over a week now.
Tomorrow morning I've got to be awake much earlier than normal for our training session. Cliff has the OTC group doing a bike-run brick session at the Garden of the Gods Park. The park road is one big loop and it's is entirely one-way traffic...so it is relatively safe for us on our bikes. If we get out there between 7 and 9:00am, it's even more safe because there is little to no traffic on that one-way road! The run segments of the brick workout are done on a gravel path that winds along the edge of the park.
There should be a relatively large group of triathletes out on the course tomorrow...the OTC has been flooded in the past week with junior and under-23 athletes. They have come into town during their summer break to acclimate to altitude before the Longmont Triathlon in 2 weeks. Our elevation in COS is just over 6000 feet...Longmont is a scant 5000 feet so those of us with almost three years of acclimatization should fare pretty well against the pour souls who fly up here from sea-level a few days before the race!
I will be participating in the Longmont race on August 12th. I spent a few hours on this computer yesterday taking care of my pre-race preparation. First, I submitted my name to USAT so they can register me through the ITU. Second, I registered with the actual race so they could take $110 from me! After that, I spent a few minutes on some search engines and Google Earth finding the race site and calculating the closest hotel. After picking out a few hotels within range, it was time to find out which ones had a room for the one pre-race night and how much they were charging.
Of course I missed out on the early-bird specials...like the home-stay options that the race director set up...and all the hotel rooms that were blocked off with a low 'triathlon price'. Fortunately, my new Marriott rewards card came in handy. I plugged in my new 'member number' and up popped an available suite at a very reasonable price! So I went back to Google Earth, plotted the hotel and mapped the distance to the race site and the pre-race meeting. Nothing was over 7 miles away so I finally had my winner!
The women's race is going to start at 1pm on Sunday...let's all hope that it is cool and overcast...and there is going to be a lot of competition on the start line. This is the place to live if you want to be a top American triathlete and I'm pretty sure I'll be standing next to all those women that live around here...Laura Bennett, Sarah Haskins, Jasmine, Groff, maybe even some long-course stars that want to dabble in a shorter race.
The Longmont race is also the fourth stop for the '07 "Haul to the Wall" series that I was runner-up in last year. I'm definitely not in the 'runner-up' position yet...far from it...because the other races have been strong fields as well. First, there was National Champs in Hawaii (I got 4th)...then the series went to the Des Moines World Cup (where I finished 17th). The third stop was in New York on the same weekend as the Pan Am Games (no points for me). It will all come down to the fifth and final race in California at the end of the season. They are awarding 'double series points' at that race and crowning the series champion afterwards. Maybe I can pull out another 'runner-up' position or (fingers crossed here) the whole kit-and-kaboodle!