First race of the season was a blast. The weather was foggy and soggy but the rain at least stopped for the duration of the race. Made it my goal to sit in and do almost no work. Of course, lined up in front, led the group out for a few minutes and then slid back to hide in the middle somewhere. The pace was kind of...ummmm...subdued for a good portion of the race. Nobody wanted to do anything, me included.


Eventually we turned into the SE winds and people started testing out the group's legs. I'm sure some of the accelerations on the back side popped the weak guys but not too many. As soon as got the tailwind while we turned to the West, paralleling I-70, the front guys gunned it and I was sitting maybe 8th wheel and the accordion was in full effect. We got it all back together and the pace slowed back down since they hadn't gotten a break. If you look at Old US-40 and CR-269, you'll see there is a U-shaped turn that we had to navigate and while moving at a pretty good speed. I was still sitting around 8th wheel as we went through this and I don't know if the front guys attacked coming out of the turn or if the guys in front of me were just that bad in the turn but when I came around the corner and tried to close the gap from the guy that almost ran himself and a bunch of other people off the road, the leaders were hauling ass and I had a ton of ground to make up. I kind of thought I'd lost the race right there and I turned on the gas to try to close the gap. I managed to cut their lead in half and flicked my elbow to signal the guys behind me to take a turn to catch the leaders. To my shock, the guy on my wheel actually came through and took his turn and, believe it or not, in a Cat 5 race we worked together to bring the leaders back. I stayed in the top 10 positions and worked on recovering from that chase.

The field kind of settled down and I think everybody was resigned to the fact that no breaks were going to go. I tried one right after we turned to the North just to see if I could get a couple of us off the front but it wasn't worth the effort so I quickly backed off. After the turn to the North, there's only a few miles left and I decided it was time to make sure I had a good position for the sprint. I wanted to be no further back than 2nd wheel for most of the lead up to the sprint. The road was narrow and we could only go 3 or 4 wide. If I was too far back, I'd never find a gap to sprint through. There was a lot of jockeying for position. The guy next to me and I were touching handlebars every few seconds, hitting our hands together that were in the drops. I wasn't uncomfortable with it and I was glad he didn't seem to be either.

A few seconds later with maybe a mile and a half to go I hear the distinct sound of a Cat 5 race. Yep, crunching, scraping, a few yells, and then a bunch of quiet from behind me. Apparently a very squirrelly guy I'd been avoiding all race had taken out 4 or 5 guys. I felt vindicated for fighting for my position. I didn't look back or really give much though to what happened behind me other than the fact that I thought this 14 year old kid, Brandon, had been taken out by the crash. I'd marked him from early on as the guy to beat as he seemed to be toying with us a lot of the race. He didn't go down but he was slowed down enough that he wasn't in contention for the sprint anymore.

Less than a mile to go, sitting 2nd wheel and I'm feeling great. The finish is a slight uphill around a left curve. At around 300m to go, the guy I'd been touching handlebars with takes off. I figured he went too early so I let one person in front of me cover him and then I latched on to that guy's wheel. Another guy was sprinting alongside the wheel I was holding, just to the left. Another guy sprinted around the guy on the left and I tried to go that way but I got blocked by the double yellow line and when I tried to go back right, the other leadout guy had fallen back and I was completely stuck. I yelled "Come on, let's go!" and they didn't really go but they split enough for me to sneak through. I sprinted as hard as I could but there was a giant gap to 2nd and an even larger gap to 1st. I closed a large portion of the gap to 2nd but there was just no way to get there.

I was actually really pleased with my sprint and I think I could have probably won and definitely would have gotten 2nd if I hadn't gotten boxed in like that. Never thought those 2 guys in front of me were just gonna sit up all of the sudden but they did. Anyway, crossed the line easily in 3rd and was a little pissed but also a little happy. My first top 3 finish and I'm really not very fit right now. Five more Cat 5 races and then I can head to the 4's. Pretty excited about that. I won a rusty frame pump and a water bottle but it's all good. Had a ton of fun and had a decent result. 36.2mph sprint on a slight uphill but with a tailwind. 8bpm below my normal MHR during races so I had some left in the tank. I think the cooler temps also probably kept my HR down a bit. Should be doing a crit on Saturday so we'll see how things go there.

Here's the GarminConnect link for my race: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/70535758