Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/1542196
Which may have been why I broke my thumb in the second lap of prac ce one. Or maybe because it was the gnarliest track we'd had in years. The dirt was so and spongy, ru ng up, chewing out, and dragging moisture onto everything, making it about five mes harder than it should have been. When you watch Tristan Hart, Jonny Walker, and Cody Webb ea ng shit repeatedly, it makes you a li le nervous for what's to come. I mashed the knuckle and p of my thumb between the bars and a rock. Luckily, you don't really do much with that part of your thumb while riding. But it hurt, and wri ng this four weeks later, my le thumb is s ll no ceably bigger than my right. We had a ten-minute break before med prac- ce. By some miracle, I set the fast lap me while going into shock, then celebrated by puking into the trash can just outside the stadium entrance. Renee Turner, Shelby's mom and almost a second mother to me at the races, offered me ssues and a reassuring pat on the back. Chester brought over breath mints. I collected myself, checked on my teammates, then sat shivering under a blanket for the next few hours, wai ng for the show to start. I consumed a handful of peanut bu er pretzels and ibuprofen. I Nearly missed my start because I was trying to locate Nikki's boots and find the giant card- board checks. This is not a story about racing, not really. I'm also past my word limit. So here's the shortest race report I've ever wri en: I won, Shelby was second, Chantelle Bykerk-Prochnau finished third, Kylee Sweeten took home fourth, and Niki Russell rounded out the top five. In the old days, Shelby and I would go out a er the final round. But now that we're promoters, I guess we're real adults now, and we were varying degrees of red and hurt. We se led for beer and pizza in my hotel room with Kylee, Meg, and Nikki. We bench raced, laughed, and joked about the weekend… and most importantly, talked about future plans. We had impressed the promoters. They had asked us to work with them again. For the first me in many years, it looks like Women's EnduroCross might have a future… And I'll raise a beer to that! January 2026 13