Race Report Part Two: Improvement?

Saturday was the road race a 22 mile circuit starting at the Golden Acorn Casino and winding through the mountains near Campo, Ca. The 5's were scheduled to start at 7:20 in the morning. The early start combined with a 50 minute drive from San Diego and my general tendency to worry about being late meant a 4:30 wake up time.

It was 35 degrees at the start... 2 years removed from the cold of Colorado has made me very, very weak... anything below 60 makes it amazingly easy to convince myself that it's a day for the trainer and a DVD of the 1998 Tour De France. Leg warmers, Polypro base layers, and EPC jacket was the kit for the day. The first 10 miles was a fairly fast, twisting 1500' decent. A quite a few of the riders had started the race without gloves, I have no idea how they did it... even with gloves my hands felt like lobster claws by the time we made the turn at the railroad tracks and begin to reclaim our lost elevation.

No one really attacked, they just picked up the pace. Within the first mile I was grateful for my choice of the Dura Ace 1380's over the PowerTap DT Swiss combo - a choice which allowed me to catch back on to the lead group after getting gaped 2 miles from the finish of the first lap. No power data to analyse, but a better race result. By the end of lap one over half of the field had been dropped.

Lap number two was practically toasty! It followed the same script, the pace was ratcheted up notch by notch and riders simply slid off the back. At the turn onto Old Hwy 80 three groups formed and I found myself in the third. One of the guys from Moment Cycle Sport was doing a ton of the work, and no one else was really pulling through to help him. Occasionally one of his teammates would take up the lead. Eventually, I moved up to give him a break and found myself setting the tempo for the last mile. About 200 feet from the line the two hangers on sprinted past leaving me to pull through in 15Th place - what a sucker.

All in all I was pretty happy with the results. 15th on the stage and 6 points to the Omnium placing me in 20th place - considering the poor TT showing not too shabby.