What we thought would be another hot and sunny day, turned out to be cold and miserable! Heather raced first and was just racing for primes, since she didn’t do so well in the road race yesterday. She won the first three primes and then right after crossing the line for the third one, her tire slid out and she crashed in the first corner. It had been drizzling the whole morning so the roads were fairly wet and the corners obviously have those painted crosswalk likes that are fairly slippery when wet. Although I didn’t see the crash happen, I knew she went down hard since she was still on the ground by the time I got over to her.
We helped her to the sidewalk so she’d be out of the way and the medics checked her out. After a few minutes, she gathered herself and seemed to be OK. It looks like it was just flesh wounds. I helped her back to the car and then she went to the medical tent to get her wounds cleaned out. Meanwhile, I jumped on my rollers for a whopping 10-minute warm-up.
It started raining harder by the time I started my race. It was fairly fast at the beginning but the worst thing was the corners. After Heather going down, I was being tentative in the corners probably wasting energy doing so. After a few laps of racing, I was totally drenched. It was also fairly cool out so I was already starting to get cold. I tried to go for a couple primes but it was futile — there was just no way without top-end power.
Another time a break that wasn’t really threatening GC went up the road so I thought it would be more comfortable to be in a break than the surge/lull nature of the pack. So I went hard up the right-side and bridged up to them in half a lap. I was so excited that maybe now I could settle into the rhythm and even stay warm. After a brief rest I pulled through and took a long pull. When I looked back to swing off I noticed the whole pack was on us! I was wondering how that happened, but after the race, Heather told me a rider was chasing down his own teammate and brought us back!
Anyway, that bridge was my one huge effort for the race and then once I was back in the pack I started to get really cold. My hands were going numb and dirt was in my right eye so I constantly had to close it, riding with only my left eye open at times. We still had about fifteen minutes of racing left and I was just miserable. Though it wasn’t as bad as a the “Race from Hail” we did in Moab when Heather and I first met, I just wanted the race to end. I managed to hang in to finish mid-pack and headed straight for the car. I changed into warm clothes as quickly as I could, but I still shivered for the next 30 minutes!
We just took off at that point so I still don’t know how I ended up overall. I think I probably stayed in 7th, but I won’t know until they post the results. Either way, it is not the greatest result but I did learn a few things and know what I need to work at this point in the season.