Teamwork

So this past weekend was a bit disappointing for me personally, but great for the team. We came out for our first weekend racing as a team and took 3rd in the road race. I chased way to many breaks down, resulting in me getting dropped the first time up the climb, but I wasn't all that upset due to the fact that it was in the low-mid 40's and raining. The ONLY reason I was disappointed was because I raced like an idiot and got dropped, when I should have been able to get over the climb and into the chase group again. This weekend is Union City, and I definitely don't plan on racing the same. I'm for sure going to be there for what's best for the team, but I'm no good to the team if I'm not there the WHOLE race to help out.

The Traveling Starts

So this weekend will be the first that I'm on the road. The Georgia Cup cycling series starts this weekend with the "Seige of Rome" weekend. The time trial is suited for me a bit, so I shouldn't get last at least. The crit seems like something I might do decent in, with the course being fairly flat. The road race, on the other hand, is quite nasty. I'll post the profile below so you can fully appreciate what I mean. For a professional race, it's not very long at just 52 miles. What does make it quite nasty, however, is the little 3 mile climb to the finish. This weekend will be the first real "test" of how well I can manage to play it smart with what I have. The past few weekends have been me acting a bit stupid when it comes to chasing breaks and such, but I can't afford to do that this weekend. I need a solid performance in the first two races, with the third being very tactical as to not allow myself to get dropped on the first climb. Click the "view elevation" button to see the course profile in another window.

Nasty Sickness

I had originally planned on blogging Friday about the upcoming weekend I had planned and such, but that didn't seem to come to fruition. Tuesday night Aaron got pretty sick, and it was confirmed by the doctor Wednesday that it was, in fact, the stomach virus. Of course the entire family had to come to make sure he was doing fine, which was a huge mistake. The entire family ended up coming down with it, except my grandfather and Hope's dad. I didn't come down with it until Friday, but it hit me pretty hard when I got it, which messed with my race preparations for the weekend.

I raced yesterday, but it wasn't anything amazing. I went to the back after a couple laps of trying to chase a break, and finally got dropped with 11 laps to go in the race. Before the race I parked next to a "no parking" area so I could lay my rollers out in that area and warm up with no disturbance from other vehicles. Of course, so idiot in a Range Rover just had to drive through the area without looking, and drove over my rollers that I got for Christmas! The damage was decent, but not too bad upon further examination today. Also, the guy gave me his trainer, which was a nice gesture. Although, it would have been nicer to get the money to fix my rollers!

Tough Race!

So I did race #3 for the season this weekend. The race was on Saturday, and was in Dacula, GA. As is the case with races that occur in bad conditions, only the serious racers (excluding me I guess) show up. There was an ex European pro among other actual pros. I got dropped 37 miles, or 1.5 hours into the race, but at that time my normalized average wattage was about 320 watts! To put that into perspective, the best output I had last season was in a local time trial where I put down 335 normalized watts for an average for 23 minutes. That means that I put out almost that many watts, but for about 4 times longer! Needless to say, even though I got dropped, I was still quite happy that my recent knee injury didn't hurt me as badly as I had originally thought!