This weekend didn't go anything close to how I hoped it would go. In fact it went almost the exact opposite. Pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
In Saturday mornings road race despite racing a killer race for 66.8 miles i got screwed in the finish by a very poorly laid out finish. Kudos to the promoters for putting on such a great weekend of racing, unfortunately all that is going to be talked about is how bad that finish was laid out. As we made the last right hand turn I was on my teammate, Mark's, wheel and ready for a leadout. Then all of a sudden the pack starts scrambling and scattering about. The promoters decided to bottle kneck our finish. The finish that was to be full open road was now bottle knecked to to just one lane. Might not sound like a big deal but when you take 50 guys going 40 miles an hour and then all of a sudden close off the road it's got a pretty big impact on the outcome. What was even worse is how they decided to bottle kneck the road, by lining up police cars on the left side of the road and that's right where Mark and I were. He was able to jump across to the right
side but I had to break quite a bit to avoid being taken out by the cop car and by the time I could try to move to the right I was totally boxed in and rubbing wheels and pumping shoulders with riders all around me. It was mass confusion and I should actually just feel lucky I was able to keep the rubber side down but I don't and I feel like I got screwed and had almost no control of my result. If you tell everyone you will have the full road at the finish, then make sure we have the full road. But wait it gets better, there were no meter markings so we never actually knew where the finish was. That's awesome. I didn't drive 191 miles and race 66.8 miles to get screwed at the finish and not even really have a chance at the win because of poor planning by the promoter. On a positive note Mark's move to the right paid off and he got the win. Then he got clipped and went crashing to the ground, spent the afternoon at the hospital and won't be back on the
bike for at least a week. I am proud of Mark and I. We raced that race to win and did a great job of working together. We never let anyone get too far up the road and took it in our own hands to bring back a majority of the breaks. We were active up front, raced a good clean race and for there only being two of us from the team there in this race I'm not sure we could of done anything any better. It was also nice to race with Erin Elliot, who came to the front and helped us reel everyone in. Hopefully we'll get to race together more next season.
Had I really thought about it before hand I probably could of predicted my time trial time. That's not necessarily a good thing though. I'm stuck in this rut of averaging between 25 to 25.5 mph on my tt's. It doesn't matter the distance, 40k or ten miles, most likely it's going to be within that range. At least I'm consistent I guess. This is one area of my cycling that I would really work on and improve by next season.
Sunday mornings crit, well it sucked for me also. My legs felt a little fatigued but opened up after about 30 minutes. Not win the race good but I'm pretty confident I could of snagged a top ten and at least got a little redemption from Saturdays races. That wasn't in the cards for me I guess. Going into the third left hand turn on the bell lap I hit a small hole with some busted chunks of asphalt in it and blew my rear tubular tire. I was able to stay up and avoided washing out as I went on through the turn but it was so late in the race I wasn't able to go the wheel pit and get my free lap. Perfect way to end the weekend and my season.
Thanks Phillip, Mark and Andy for making the trip. It was great getting to hang out with you guys.
Now I'm just trying to hurry and get home to see my girls. What I've been waiting for all weekend and the only way to end my weekend on a good note.
Sent from Chad's iPhone
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