For my first race up in the A's I was expecting to start in the back ten tenths of the pack and see what I could do to work my way up. But I guess due to pre-registering a few weeks ago, and some decent results on x-results, I got a really good starting position. 9th! I was enjoying being up in the top five for the first lap. Even though I was thinking to my self, "Man, this is hard. Can these guys really keep this up for another 50 minutes." And, "Nah they're just going this hard to get the first lap preem and then it'll settle down. Then I'll be in good shape to continue on and hammer my way around the course, picking up speed as the race goes on."
That kind of happened. Once the second lap started, there were a couple of hot shots that made breaks in the straights to get up near the lead, and couple other people dropping back after having won the preem...ahem. And then Brad Sheehan happened. We had a misunderstanding and we ended up getting tangled together. Such is racing I guess.
Just to be clear he ended up jambing one drop into my rear wheel and the other around my top tube. We eventually untangled, and things looked good enough with my rear wheel. Meanwhile a good five or six people whizzed by. It would have been more, but I think this slowed up a lot of the trailing pack. The kicker is that that once Brad gets off ahead of me he promptly eats on the second turn we come to. I did my best to avoid him, but couldn't manage to complete miss his head. Sorry Brad.
I continued to put my head down and crank away for the rest of the race. I caught a rider or two, and got dusted on a couple on straight sections. The course was pretty fun. But even by the end of the race I couldn't set up well for the barriers/corner/run-up. That was tricky. The head wind was not fun. I was pretty glad to see Aaron Millet roll a tubular in front of me on the second to last lap. Chalk another one up for clinchers baby!
I finished 12th. (not too bad considering)
Results are here.
2 comments:
I knew I was going to be headed straight backwards at about the 5 minute mark of that race. Figured I might as well get paid for it first :)
Yeah, in hind sight I should have hit it and gone for the preem. I think on the first lap I was still dazed by my second row call up.
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