So I've written two separate pieces about last weekend's racing already. One in VeloNews: impartial, moderately concise, but lacking a whole lot of color (I'll see about adding more of that later...) and one for this site and 303cycling.com which was focused on the triumphs and tribulations of the CSU Rams Cycling Team as a whole. Some of 303cycling's readers didn't seem to get that the second article was never intended to be impartial nor particularly professional, but I digress.

My point is that I am yet to write about my actual race. I got to put my name in the VN article once, but did not describe my races in any detail. Women's B's get as much space as the Men's A's, and I have a word limit. So here is my race report, about my race, written by me about me, because this is my damn blog! So here goes nothin:

Saturday, 4:35 am. Alarm goes off. I inaudibly curse the C-men and their 8am start time, roll out of bed, make my awesome breakfast burritos, put the loaner bike (see previous posts for why I was on a loaner bike...) on the car, and head over to the Moby parking lot to meet up with the rest of the team at 5:15. Drive to Denver's City Park, arrive by 6:45, herd C-men cats all over the place, teach their clinic, watch them and the rest of our riders of every category totally kill it, and finally at 10am start to think about my own race at 11:30. 

First race of the season is always a big question mark. This season especially, since I'll be in Base (capital B) mode for another two weeks. I know I have the hours, endurance will not be a problem. But the high intensity stuff is, of course, lacking.

Turns out, it's all good. 

So I line up late, about 10 yards behind the field. Official says GO, I start riding as the back line fumbles around with their pedals, I look for gap, and pop into the top 10 by the second corner. Well done me! That worked well.

First 15 minutes are fast, but not crazy. I notice how my higher threshold this year is enabling me to just chill, or even recover, while others seem to be in a bit of difficulty. That's very cool. I

 throw down an attack, take a prime, then remember that I haven't really spent much time over threshold in 5 months, and return to the field with my tail between my legs. Alister goes off the front, followed by Zack and some new CU guy. With CU, FLC and us all up the road, the chase shuts down. On the front, I'm hangin out watching the birds and marveling at the weather. From what I hear the back still kind of sucked due to the nature of the course (somewhat technical), but up front was pretty dandy.  The smaller teams spent about 15 minutes trying to bridge, but we jumped on everything so nothing was even close to successful. After they gave up things got even slower, and I got bored. Threw in a few more little efforts, again did not really get anywhere (CU wasn't too keen on me or anyone else getting anywhere). 

At six to go, Trevor came up the front and started pulling. I believe his intention was to start up a leadout, but I was the only guy up front at that point so I just sat behind him for three laps in second wheel. Very weird. He pulled off, I scooted back a couple spots. CU took over for the last 

few laps, Chris came up with me as did Logan. I had a little lapse in concentration and fell to about 10th with one to go, but used the chicane and following acceleration to move back up to about seventh wheel.  Kept that through the next roundabout, moved up again in the next stretch to fifth (Chris was first or second at this point). Came into the last roundabout in that position, idiot in front of me lost a bunch of ground in the corner, so I came out with maybe 8m to make up on Chris, who was now leading. Started sprinting, caught and passed the CU guys who were up front and the FLC guy who screwed me on the last corner, got up next to Fuzzy and came across the line a hair behind him to take 2nd in the field. So CSU was one and two in the field sprint, plus Zack pulled 2nd up the road, and Logan put in a good last lap effort to hold onto 9th. Four guys in the top ten, three in the top five, when we only had 7 in the whole race - not too shabby! 

The numbers:

1:01

AvWatts: 246 (3.92w/kg) <-- nothing impressive there.

Normalized: 291 in GC, 314 in PowerAgent. I like the higher number personally. But both are a bit bogus.

Best 5s: 1317 (21.36w/kg). Actually had pretty good 15s numbers too. Sprint never seems to go away. The w/kg number is why I like uphills sprints so much...

Overall impression of form: definitely not in race shape, but the threshold work and massive base made up for it. Plus the fact that I stayed up front kept the accelerations to a minimum. I would not have been a happy camper tailgunning on Saturday. So I'm pretty pleased with where I am right now, for the most part. I have a natural physiological inclination towards the high intensity stuff, rather than threshold, so it should all come back quickly once I move out of Base season. 

What I'd really like to do is win something in the next few weekends so I can just work for others for a while. Logan and Adam both work super hard for the team, and in the races,  and deserve some glory. I would like nothing more than help either of them pull off a W. 

Quick Metro TT recap: so I didn't really think I'd be a factor (I rarely am in time trials), but I guess the the whole big volume base stuff really has worked because I rode a somewhat mediocre race and pulled off 3rd. I honestly felt like I was dragging a brick up the only real climb on course. But hey, I'll take it!  

Next weekend is CU, where I have crashed two years in a row despite it being the lamest, least technical course imaginable, and UNC which is on a brand new course. Should be a good time!