Monday, April 10, 2006

Philly 2 day day 2: aka "grey skies are going to clear up"

I was up at 615am for some reason. Maybe cause I knew there was only 8 pancakes in the fridge, or maybe cause there was sweet coffee to drink, or actually cause I had to clean my whole bike after the grime fest of yesterday's race.

We ate and rolled out in kind of a rush. I didn't realize we were leaving so soon and got totally frazzled about my missing glove. It had velcro on it and I know somebody is going to find it in their chamois or something. Whatever.

Bike path ride to the race in time to watch the women finish. It was still kind of chilly when they were racing. Jared showed up and proceeded to have a bunch of stuff go really wrong. Like: flatting on his tubular, actually it just totally blowing out. Then Fred was like "yeah dude borrow my new carbon wheel" but the freehub was kind of gnarled and we couldn't get a cassette onto it. Jared had to race with his training back wheel.

We had mad dudes in the race, ill try alphabetical by last name: babik, billet, graff, hacker,hebe, kincaid, martin, stubna, ... I really think that is it, sorry if I forgot. Good thing Dave Mitchell rode down to watch or else Fatty wouldn't have had shoes to wear (my worst nightmare come true!)...

The race started fast, and was pretty fast in the middle and then ended really fast. I felt pretty good. Its weird racing out there where I don't know who a single person is. I'm sure in a few more races Ill get to know some of the key players or whatever, but I only know a few dudes and they are on my team.. haha. There were a few promising moves. I felt good, but for some reason I was really hesitant to go with anything or try to bury myself bridging up to anything. Maybe next time. I nailed it a few times on the hill to close gaps or chase dudes down, and man do those freaking wheels go fast. Like really fast. I have like 3 memories from the race:
- being happy my hands worked well enough to drink a bottle
- realizing the one dude we were supposed to watch was off the front and burying myself to get up to the front to chase him down, but I guess everybody wanted to be on his wheel, so they chased him down first.
- geronimo saying "stay up here" when I was going backwards after said effort. Then Im like "oh my god there are only 5 laps left!!!"
- having a good spot with 1 to go until some huge dude leaned on me and scared me away

Oh well. Good times were had, I thought maybe I would sneak into the top 20 overall. I doubt it though, well see.
Jared won overall, Hacker snuck into the break and ended up with 3rd overall, Geronimo not trying on Saturday and getting 5 overall, and stubna with the 10th! Pretty freaking sweet.

No comments: