Treasure Valley Rally

I'm running out of week here so I'm going to go ahead and do a race report this morning despite only having 1/2 hour to do so.

As I mentioned before, last week's race, the off road tri, left my legs completely shot.  It wasn't until Friday (6 days after the race) that I was able to walk without much of a limp and my two rides were VERY short totalling a massive 1:30.  Because of that, I had no idea how the legs were going to feel come race day.  The 1:16 pre-ride helped a bit but come race time, the legs still felt super sluggish.  Mike, on the other hand, said that his legs felt great and was easily either staying with me during our pre-ride or riding away from me.  My game plan for the race was to let a few folks get out in front and I would settle into a pace I knew I could sustain and hope the legs came around.

When the gun went off, I entered the woods around 5th or 6th place.  On the very first turn I witnessed some dude make a stupid inside pass right in front of me only to overcook the hairpin turn onto a gravel road and eat shit right in front of everybody.  Good stuff.

Mike had a good start and was riding just ahead in 2nd and looking strong.  My goal was to keep them in sight but try not to close the gap just yet but also keep folks at bay behind me.  I knew that Aaron Millett (2nd place in overall points) was close behind and Bob Carney was right behind me.  Before long, I had moved into 3rd place but Mike and the first place rider was slowly pulling away.  Somewhere maybe 15-20 minutes into the lap, Bob passed me.  I wasn't too concerned because we hadn't yet gotten to the real technical stuff and, from previous races, I thought that Bob didn't handle tech stuff all that well so I'd be able to get around in the second half of the course. 

Unfortunately, it became apparent pretty quickly that bob was hitting the tech stuff just fine.  In fact, he seemed to be cleaning the sections much better than I was and, before long the top three riders were pulling away.

Lap two was when things finally started to come together.  Looking at my splits from the race, I was a bit faster on lap one but I slowed down much less than everyone else on lap two and I quickly started to pick off positions.  I think I got Mike first (who was riding with only the big and little rings after the hammer of truth was unable to fix his middle ring problems, swallowed a hug bug, got dirt in his eyes and delivered a premature baby during the race), then it was Bob who I caught about mid lap during a climb and then I only had Andreas ahead.  When I finally passed him (can't remember where it happened) I went about trying to catch any of the expert senior 1 & 2 racers who went off 2 minutes before us.  I had no idea how many were ahead so, whenever I saw someone ahead, I dug in and tried to pass.

The rest of the lap was pretty uneventful except for a missed turn about 10 minutes from the finish.  I have no idea how I missed it since I had made the turn three times before but I did, losing a minute or two in the process.

When I finally crossed the line, I had closed the gap to the only expert ahead of me, John Kinnee, to about 20 seconds giving me the overall victory for the day and cementing my series points lead.  Yay!

More thoughts to come.