After a rainy Friday, which resulted in the cancellation of the first stage, we got our racing-fix on Saturday with a double-stage: an 80 mile road race in the morning, followed by a 4 mile time trail in the afternoon. For the road race we had to do three laps on pretty narrow roads, which promptly resulted in a lot of yellow-line violations. Some of our guys also got send to the back but I still got pretty frustrated trying to move up fairly just to get passed by 5 guys on the left on the other side of the road. Anyway, we controlled to race for the first lap until things started to pick up and attacks started flying left and right but all of them got shut down until we were about halfway through the second lap. At this point three guys managed to open up a gap at the front… and we had Peter in there! That was great, as this was our plan for the day and we were shooting for the team overalls. The three stayed away all the way to the finish; unfortunately, Peter got dropped with 6 kilometers to go and just barely managed to stay ahead of the field. Joe and Nathan lead me out for the field-sprint but I lost Nathan’s wheel going into the last 300 meters, so I had to fight for myself. Still managed to come in 5th of the pack, so 8th overall. Two guys in the Top 10, not bad. But not good enough, as two other teams did even better.
In the afternoon we had a chance to make up for lost time in the time trail. We got to ride to the race to loosen our legs a little before starting the warm up for real. I felt decent during the warm up but as soon as I got out of the gate and accelerated to tt-speed, my legs made it very clear that they wouldn’t do what my brain told them to do, i.e. GO FAST. I ended up mashing a huge gear (spinning didn’t work at all). It helped that Leo had started right in front of me and I was determined not to let him get away. I ended up 5th, about 13 seconds down. I was pretty happy with that. Nathan did well too but Peter was pretty blown form his effort earlier in the day and lost some time. So overall, I was sitting in 6th, Nathan in 9th and we were still third in the team-gc.
Well, we had one more chance to advance in the overalls with a circuit race on Sunday. It was a rather short course, so it played out more like a Crit than a circuit race. The plan was to get Nathan and Leo in a break to get some time but that didn’t work. Nothing stayed away longer than a couple of laps. Will and Peter did a great job in pulling back stuff all through the first half of the race. I made sure we were represented in the breaks in the second half and actually found myself in a four-man break with 3 laps to go. But again, we got sucked back in and with one lap to go it was one big pack again. Nathan, Leo and Joe came by me with half a lap to go and I jumped on their wheel. Nathan didn’t get the lead out he would have liked to but found a fast wheel for the sprint and came flying by everyone else to take a solid victory! First one for Metro Volkswagen! Of cause, we were all stoked that it finally worked out. I managed to come in 6th of the day; Leo came in 9th, so you could say that it was a successful day. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to move up in the team-gc but that was ok. Nathan also got a time bonus for the win and actually bumped me back one place in the overalls. Turns out, after doing the math, that I’m missing one point for my upgrade to a cat 1 after this weekend… Now guess how many points I lost by loosing this one spot in the overall. Grrrrrrrr, thanks Nathan ;-)
This next weekend we will start the US Crit Series… that’s going to be painful! But a lot of fun at the same time.
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