Deer Trail RR

The course today featured some long flat roads potential for huge cross winds. The winds never really came. But.. a bike race being a bike race it was still hard. The early break went away pretty fast and I tried to bridge, I left it a bit to late and found my self in the middle nowhere… in the race and… in general. Dear Trail is a tiny town. They don’t get much smaller. Any who, I sat up and waited to for the pack after 5 minutes of killing myself. We did the attack each other stop. Then one or two teams would work for a bit. Stop, attack. Repeat. After the first section of the course we barreled back through town and out onto the second sector with was much hillier. I was feeling good as the as we hit the first long drag hard, the pack slowed I kept the pace going shooting of the front. Again I had a nice gap but the little wind that was kicking up made for hard work and the pack was chasseing again. I slotted in and the big boys started to fire. After a few more miles things were getting pretty strung out. I marked the strong guys and then came around a gap and up to a nice move started by Jon Tarkington. The Vitamin Cottage rider has a reputation for being very crafty and yeah, strong too. We were away. 3 of us. And soon 5. This is it I thought. We made another u-turn to begin that last hilly out and back. As we picked up the early break I accelerated over a steep little rise trying to drop the early breakers and take the strong guys to the line. But no one wanted any of that. Now I had 3 V. C. team mates to deal with a 4 or 5 others sitting on. It wasn’t long before the vitamin guys were putting on the pressure and after a few attacks I rolled through the front and Jon was gone. I couldn’t cover and he was away. With the early guys sitting on or hanging on rather after there 70 miles of hard work. With the other vitamin guys sitting on things were getting tricky. I road, hard. 2 or 3 others were taking pulls as well. With Jon dangling out front we were attacked again by the rested legs of his teammate. He made the junction quickly and now we were all looking stupid, or just out manned and out smarted? I can’t figure out which. We barreled into the line and my legs had nothing as the sprint opened up I could barley hold the wheel and ended up 6th.
A solid effort and I was pleased with my result despite the tactics being agents me. Lessons were learned and the last bit of fine tuning for the Gila complete. Next week will be interesting. Stay tuned.