I woke up at 5am this morning. My legs felt like death, just like they did the previous morning. It was a hard week. I didn’t feel good during warmup either. The weather was alright, though. That’s good.
The race was pretty crazy. A five man break got away early, and built a reasonable gap. Slowly the gap shrunk, then grew again. It ended with David Monnig taking an epic solo victory after shelling the rest of the break bits at a time. Holding off the whole field for at least half a lap by himself is pretty impressive. I wouldn’t say we were chasing at all-out, though.
I sprinted hard out of the dam corner on laps 2 and 3 with an Ironclad guy and were a few seconds ahead of the field for a minute or so. I pulled the pack up a hill a couple times. I didn’t feel like I really had the legs for the sprint, so I was going to get a good training ride out of it. I saved during lap 4 as much as I could, snuck up to top 10 with 3k to go, starting setting up and let it go. The sprint started when I didn’t really want it to (which happened last time, hmm, maybe I should work on that), and I was in too big of a gear. I was very close to getting 3rd in the pack sprint, but a guy got around me at the end. I knew he would. I didn’t have anything left. Fifth (4th in the pack sprint + guy with solo win) at the end of three hard weeks of training is totally fine. I seem to get beat on the line for 3rd.
Everybody thinks I’m going to get my Cat 3 upgrade sometime soon. I thought it was a long way off, but I just did the math. I have 11 points as a Cat 4 from my 4th and 5th place finishes, and I need 20 points to upgrade. If I win next week (unlikely), I’ll get my Cat 3 upgrade by 1 point. That’ll make me a collegiate A, which will be… hard. I feel like I was at the edge for a significant part of the race today (on the hills), so an extra mile-per-hour average or two would not work out so well. It’d be good, err, experience.
The Banana Belt Series standing is looking good for me. Maybe I’ll get some swag.
I’m tired. Rest week coming up. Sweet.
