With about five minutes before the start, Chris and I emerged from his truck to finish getting ready and ride a warm-up lap. Within a few minutes, we were absolutely soaked. Since we did not have much of a warm-up, I led the first few laps at a casual 16 mph to build more of a warm-up in. Surprisingly, no one came around me for a few laps. When they finally did, Chris responded and we started shredding people from the group. Mind you, we only started with 6 people. At about the half-way point, Chris and I had driven everyone off of our wheels except for John (the 3rd place finisher from the previous week), but we had started to notice that he was weaker than us and struggling more in the wind. As I came around to the front with about 10-13 minutes left to go, I mentioned to Chris that I was going to shred this guy. I drilled it through the wind section and then as we exited the wind section Chris took over at the front and kept the pace high. Within the lap, John was gone and Chris and I settled into a rhythm for the remainder. As we approached the finish line, I let Chris take the line while I sat up to cheer the effort. Hank, racing his first bike race ever, rode a solid race and took 4th!
Earlier in the day, Jeff McKillip represented the Emerys team well and took 2nd in the Masters 55+!
Now we are all home, warming up and getting food in our bellies!
Happy riding!
You guys are way tougher than my poor warm, dry comfortable self today. I did make up for it training with the Sunday morning group with a serious training sacrifice. Still feeling the effects of going into overdrive for too long.
ReplyDeleteI really don't understand the concept of " I let him take the line"? Why race if when you have the opportunity to win, you don't take it.
ReplyDeleteHe is my teammate and he typically does a lot of work for me in lead up to the sprints. The roads were also rather messy, so I decided it was safer if we just rode across the line instead of trying to sprint for it.
ReplyDelete