Joe Martin Stage Race

Two weeks ago the team went out to Fayetteville, AK for the Joe Martin Stage Race, a four day stage race. We started off on Thursday with a short 3 mile uphill time trail. It went really well for me: I beat my time from last year by 30 seconds to finish third, tied for second, only 3 seconds back. So, off to a good start.

On Friday we got to spend a lot of time on the bike because we had to ride a 110-mile-stage. Everyone kept on talking about the big climb of the day, Mount Gaylor… turns out it was more like a bunch of rollers than a really sustained climb and most of the pack stayed together. Unfortunately, we had a break off the front and no one wanted to chase. The plan for the day had been to ride conservative and conserve the GC but after the guy up the road got a four minute lead and still no one was doing any work I had to help out and get some kind of chase organized. We ended up pulling it back down to 40 seconds but had to spend a lot of energy to do it. It cost me a spot in the GC but everything was still rather close together.

Stage three was a 23 mile loop which we had to do three times. There was a pretty steep climb in the first part of the loop but it wasn’t very long. As with the race on Friday it all stayed pretty much together over the climbs but Carlos Vargas took off with about 30 miles to go. I figured that it was way too far and we had some teams that seemed to be willing to pull it back, so I didn’t go with it… and that was a mistake. We chased hard but couldn’t pull him back. So there went another spot in the GC, down to fifth.

With all the positions lost over the last two days, it was up to us to ride an aggressive crit to make up for lost time on Sunday. Unfortunately they guys from Texas Tough had the same plan and really drilled it from the gun which killed most of our team. After the first couple of laps we were down to only about 20-30 guys. With about five laps in I attacked hard over the steep section of the course and managed to decimate the group further, down to about 10 guys. More importantly, we shelled the overall leader and fourth place, so now it was up to us in the break to open up enough of a gap to move up in GC. We worked together well until halfway through the last lap when the attacks started. We let two guys go because they were no threat in GC but sprinted it out for third. I came in fourth of the day which moved me back to third overall. So a hard day’s work paid off at the end.

It was a good race, the team worked well together and we managed to pull off a good result. With this in mind we packed our stuff and headed down the road to the next stop, the Tour of Arkansas in Russellville, AK.