2011 Goal Met

Sunday August 21st was my third Race the Lake expierience. The day starts very early, alarm went off at 3:45am, I get out of bed and started preparing my food and drinks for the race. Then I put all my stuff outside sipping my coffee and waiting for my ride (Ryan Pokorny). We were on the road by 4:30am and up at the races in Fond Du Lac @ 5am. We parked by some other team mates, and then we went and had them mark us with our numbers.

We lined up @ 5:40am and were off by @ 5:50am. This is third time doing this race and this year is the slowest start so far. We were going so slow that wave 2 caught up to us. I am not going to complain becasue you won't catch me going to the front and do any pulling, well at least not until we are passed High Cliff Park. This is the dredded climb about half way through the race. I didn't loose any bottles this year, I put 2 in my jersey pockets and one in my down tube. This kept my seat post cage open, this is the one that it falls out of. I did run someone's bottle over in the race. Once we were passed Oshkosh I put a bottle in the seat post cage and put the other bottle into the middle jersey pocket.

I saw one really bad crash that I was able to avoid, by just squeezing through a hole that openned up at the last second, otherwise I would have been in that pile. I knew I had a team mate by me and hoped that everyone made it through ok. Before High Cliff they ramped up the pace a bit and one of my goals for this year was to make it up the climb with the main group. On the climb I kept it in the big ring knowing that if I would put it in my small ring that I would be going even slower up the climb. I kept passing people and mentally telling myself to keep pushing, I was with a very small group at the top, but we managed to catch back onto the main field. I am going to say that this is close enough to the main field on the climb and say that my "GOAL" was met. I guess there was a group of 6 that got off the front after the climb.

The rest of the race was pretty fast and I just raced smart for the most part. There were a lot of surges and guys trying to start a chase group, but nothing was working. At one point I did feel strong enough and was in a short lived pace line. Getting towards the end of the race it was a very big field, probably close to 80 racers and I was a bit concerned on how this was going to finish out. Crash or no crash? I made it through the last two corners up right and started sprinting, well, if that is even what you would call it after 90 miles in the saddle. Not an impressive sprint, but I did pass people before I crossed the finish line.

I finished 39th overall, 6th in my age bracket, my time was 3:25:23.7, and my average overall speed was 26mph. All in all race went very well for me and I am really excited on how I finished. Coaching really helped, so I would like to thank Jeff Melcher at Cycling Form and Fitness for his service.

We also placed 2nd as a mixed gender team!

Down side, Ryan was involved in that one crash and didn't finish the race, his was smashed with a chain ring and need stitches and may need a MRI if he doesn't get any better in about 3 days. So, I hope he recovers quickly!

What is next, don't know, just going to have some fun!

Later