Saturday, March 28, 2009

I still just don't know if I get it...

I had started this post a different way, but then walked away and lost motivation to go on being all philosophical about road racing. The short story: I went to the Charge Pond race today expecting to do very well and didn't. I had to do the B-race in the interest of getting home early and it was, unfortunately, every bit the sketch fest that I feared. Several times during the race I went to the front and pulled everyone around for a lap or so simply to get the pace up and to stay away from people. With 6 to go on the downhill left-hander some guy on the inside of me must have panicked or something because he locked it up, fishtailed, and then when I tried to get around him he came close to completely t-boning me. Fortunately he sort of just grazed me and my bike handling skills are about a billion times better than a few years ago so I was able to ride out of it, but by then I was chasing big time since the pace picked up right at the same time as this incident. It took the better part of two laps to completely latch back on and by then it was getting pretty late in the affair and the general bike handling of the pack was not improving at all making moving up through it difficult. I thought I finally had an opening up the last rise, but then all but the first 8 or so almost seemed like they sat up cresting the hill so that was that. Disappointing to say the least. I got a good workout in so that's worth something, but I still find it hard to count a race as good if I wasn't where I had to be when it mattered. Then again I could always just stick to the dirt...

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