Tales from Winghaven....

I did this race last year and made the mistake of popping a couple Tylenol PM's the night before. Propably not the smartest thing to do, needless to say, it was a hot miserable day which ended up with me getting shot off the back of the peleton with about three laps to go. I ended up riding with another rider for the last couple of laps. Yesterday, I actually got some sleep and the legs seemed to feel pretty good. I thought if they were having the KOM, actually more of a hill competition, I'd go for it. It was going to be a tall order though since this was an NRC race and a CAT 2/3, instead of just 3's. They announced 93 entries for the race. It turned out to be a bigger field then even the pro,1's field. As for the team, we were going to try to get somebody in a break and try to control, which is propably what every other team was going to try. After about 10 minutes on the trainer I headed over to the team tent only to be delayed. While waiting myself and a couple teammates took a warm-up lap.

After waiting around it was finally time to line it up and I got a front row spot. At this point they told us we were now doing 10 instead of the 12 laps of the 2.74 mile course, and there there would be no KOM competition. Well, there went my plan for the race. It was actually a good decision because once we got going I could tell my legs were not as good as I thought they would be. I don't know if that was from the heat(mid 90's plus humidity), doing 45 miles in the heat a couple days prior, or just the fast pace of the race. Either way I'll chalk it up to a combination of all three. Once the gun went off I stayed towards the front for the first two laps, but soon found myself fading towards the middle of the pack. On the second or third lap I went around athe first round-about and heard the awful sounds of metal hitting pavement. It turned out it was just behind me and caused several riders to come to a complete stop including a teammate. Those riders were not able to bridge back on because of the blistering pace, especially having to go up the climb with zero momentum to take you through. As the race went on I found myself getting delirious from the heat. I took two bottles of accelerade and another with water. I should've taken two with water because I went through every bit of it just to cool myself down.

The team was not able to sustain anything and soon everyone was in a big group ride. Any breaks that went off were quickly covered. The heat was enough to contend with let alone trying to stay off the front. All pre-race planning was out the window at that point and the task was now to get our sprinters to the front. With a couple laps to go the pace grew and on the last lap coming down the 40mph decent there was another crash on the 90 degree left hander. I took the inside and didn't even know or hear the crash. It took out two teammates, one being our sprinter and a buddy from another team, also a sprinter. I ended up doing my own impression of a sprinter and sprinted to the uphill finish. I narrowly avoided one guy tumbling to the ground. He apparently crashed by himself from sprinting too hard, weird. Glad that the race was over I crossed the line in 28th.

The race afterwards was the Pro, Cat 1 race. I envy the guys who finished that race, hell, even for the guys that didn't. It was even hotter then our race and almost three times as long. I stayed and took lessons from Brian Jenson who put on an impressive one man show of how to go on a break. He ended up finishing second, but impressive nonetheless.