Ohio Road Race Report

Kari and I woke up really early to eat some delicious breakfast. I had coco puffs in chocolate milk. You might be asking yourself, isn't that too much chocolate? That's a big fat nay! Kari had the more sensible breakfast: rice crispies in skim. We finished off our breakfasts with a pair of bananas and finished getting the car loaded.

We were on the road to Ohio by 8am to start our 3 hour drive. We decided that for future races, if the distance away is longer than 2 hours driving, we are grabbing a room close by the night before. We made it there with a little over an hour before the start of the race to check in and do any last minute preps before going for a nice little warm up. With this being a fairly long (compared to all the crits I normally do) road race (38 miles), we did not spend a huge amount of time warming up.

They lined us up as if we were cattle going off to slaughter by our start times to allow us access to the course. Instead of lining up at the start line, they had us do a rolling start. I've learned that I really dislike those. I made the mistake of lining up way too far back, so I had to use the transition to the actual start line to move up. While it wasn't too difficult to do thanks to the hills. By the time I latched onto the lead pack at the crest of the hill at the start/finish line, I didn't have enough gas to hang at their pace after the hill. I fought to get back on for the rest of the first lap before finding a group of guys to ride the rest of the way with.

The rest of the race was fairly uneventful. I was vastly stronger than my little cohort, especially on the hills, so I usually had to wait for them after each hill to catch back up. I could've gone solo, but the hills were a little brutal to suffer alone. On the final lap, our friendly little bunch had dwindled down to just three and I drove us home taking the hill top finish first.

After I crossed the line, I started looking for Kari. I thought she only had a 30 mile race, so she should be at the top waiting. At the start line for her race, they increased the womens race to the same distance as the cat5s, so she wasn't quite done yet. She did great though. She stayed with the womens field for most of the race and finished in the top 15 she thinks! Pretty awesome for her first ever road race! I'll update actual results later!

For those of you ever interested in racing in southern Ohio, be warned that "rolling hills" means something different to them than it does to me! Most of the hills were nice rollers, but there were at least three that were much more substantial!