Cascade: Day Three

I had a nice ice bath last night before bed. I slept well. After making some bottles up, Jim, Heather and I headed out for the circuit race. My legs felt okay, and better than I expected after getting destroyed up to Mt. Bachelor yesterday. I rolled around for half an hour before the start with a couple little efforts, trying to get my legs to go. They didn’t really want to.

I avoided almost crashing during the rollout today, hooray. It felt like the pace was high from the honk-honk of the Lead car, but maybe my legs were being whiney. I held on fine, then we went down a pretty sweet little descent. The course was cool, but the accordion effect and short rollers put me in some difficulty. I fell off the group a few minutes after the feed zone, around mile 11. Bummer. The rest of my race wasn’t that exciting, except for that continued feeling of not being able to get my legs to turn over very well, regardless of cadence.

Right before the beginning of lap 4, Rick the Official rolled up beside me and told me to go straight through the round-about to the finish, rather than turn right for my last lap. I complied. I finished. I got a pro-rated time of 42 minute behind the leaders. Ouch.

My time put me at 31st of 33 today. Overall I was also 31 of 33, a cool 68 minutes back.

No crashing, adequate hydration and nutrition, and an awesome experience made Cascade totally worthwhile though. Some combination of elevation, heat, South Carolina, fast guys and not being quite strong enough left me off the back for the important parts of the race, but I’m not worried about it. The whole thing was fun. I hope I’ll have some legs to be competitive next year.

So what’s left for the year? I’m looking at Eugene Celebration. Maybe some more Eugene Twilight Crits. Probably the Mary’s Hillclimb. Hopefully some cross. (Anybody got a lead on a cheap-but-good 58cm cross frame?)

Heidi Swift, Chris Horner, and Ivan Stevic are awesome.