Way the fuck up there
This year they expanded the race to include a sweet 4.3 mile ITT on Friday night, the criterium was the same from years previous, and the road race got an additional 20 miles added to it to make it a whopping 128 miles! Epic! Thankfully, Drew Otte's girlfriend made the trip up with us to work the feedzone- she was a lifesaver passing up bottles via musette bags!
Friday TT:
I really wish I could have pre-rode the course. It wasn't nearly as technical as they made it sound and having a little bit of insight going into it would have gone a long, long way. I think there were 8-9 corners, so if you lost 2 seconds on each corner...there went the race. I didn't do a great time since I'm not really good at prologues, somewhere in the 9:50's, I didn't look closely since David Williams busted out an 8:53 for the win. Talk about making me feel slow!
Saturday Crit:
The course is in downtown Mt. Pleasant, with a lot of cheering fans, smooth pavement, and wide lanes. The clouds started to clear up in the middle of the race and it turned out to be a great day. A little chilly (low 60's) but not bad. I was having a pretty good race until I got a flat at the half way point. I'm not a fan of the current tubulars I have on my race wheels, so I was using my clinchers. I wasn't too happy having to swap out my super grippy pro race 3 for a slippery specialized mondo. The missed laps really through me off my rhythm too and I just couldn't get back into it.
Post-flat awesomeness
Sunday Road Race:
This was what I was looking forward to the whole time- 128 miles of road race action! I knew the race could play out in three ways: field sprint, late break, or long/early breakaway. Ideally a late break would have been nice, but I was feeling super fresh so I knew I could go for the day-long move as well. I swear, I must have some French in me due to my predisposition to go for the often doomed day long move.
Early on a Wolverine ride just rode off the front of the race, no one wanted to do anything at the front, so we just sat there. Then a Bissell rider just rode off the front- again no one wanted to ride fast at all. So, I joined him, we upped the pace and quickly caught the Wolverine rider, soon after that we were joined by a Louis Garneau guy and that was the break. Formed at mile 5...of 128. The Garneau rider, Kevin, was the strongest, while Dan, Tom, and I were about equal. We kept the pace high and our pulls to about 45 seconds to a minute. Over the next 20 miles we got a big gap- almost 8 minutes and Kevin won the first sprint on the road, as well as both KOM's (I got 4th and 2nd, giving me 3rd in that competition). We dropped Tom (wolverine) before the first feedzone and that left the 3 of us to march on for another 70 miles. Soon, Dan got tired- and we couldn't drop him since he had 9 teammates in the field- so it just left Kevin and I to pull.
At mile 60 we learned we had 8 minutes...at mile 65 we had 4. Turns out Panther wanted to bring us back. We upped the pace and held on for a long time at about 1.5-2 minutes. Finally at about mile 85 we got caught. And then all hell broke loose with counter attacks from Bissell flying left and right. We spent the next 5 miles or so speeding along at nearly 30 mph. I made it until about 105 miles in before I couldn't handle all of the hard accelerations anymore. Thankfully, it was all heading South, with a big tailwind, at that point, so I was able to go reasonably fast without much effort. I came in 47th, the last finisher about 15 minutes down. But! I finished a stoopid long race, got 50 bucks for the KOM, and was in an 80 mile break. Not bad. I wish we could have had 1-2 more riders with us in the break or that Panther let us dangle until 10 KM to go, but not much you can do.
All in all, it was an awesome weekend of races and I look forward to next year! And my legs are still sore from that damn break...
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