I'm Dragging Arse

An illness is sweaping through the family right now, I'm behind in work as a result of staying home with B yesterday and now I've got a scratchy throat so I'm going to keep this quick again. I had a fun filled weekend that was capped off with my last SIP training crit of the season. The crits only go one more week and I've got my first mountain bike race this coming weekend so this was to be it for me.

I had hoped to have better legs than at the last crit and felt pretty good during my warm-up. I told myself before the race that I'd try to take it easy towards the begining and conserve myself for a strong finish. Well, that plan went in the shitter pretty darn quick. After the first lap, a prime was announced and then there were several more (all for cash) within the first 10 laps of the 20 lap race. This meant that the pace was uber high the whole time and I actually found myself contesting a couple of them. I wasn't successful in either attempt but (because of a bit of bad luck and rookie-ism) I did manage to lead out one of the sprints.

All that added up to me suffering a bit to even stay in the group. I never dangled off the back but I did worry at a couple of points that it might happen. We've all had one of those days on the road when you're just sure that your brakes are rubbing right? Well, that was how I was feeling for most of the race but having stopped in the middle of a road ride way too many times only to find that it was all in my head I knew that this could not be the case. Think again. After I got home from the race and went to unload the bike to hook it up to B's trailer (we were riding to dinner)I noticed a serious amount of drag and saw that at some point my brake had been forced hard into the rim. I'm not sure how or when it happened but it sure does make me wonder. Maybe my "competition" was so intimidated that they felt like they needed to even the playing field. Hmmmm.

In the end, I had pretty good position going into the final sprint but faded with about 50m to go and watched about 25 guys blast past me. I did manage to pass the two women in the field though before sitting up. Yay me.