With warmer, dryer weather and more quality training under my belt, the Birds of Prey road race went much better than the Slammer. I actually finished this one! It started out a bit nippy but the bright sunshine warmed it up enough that I was only cold for the first hour.

My legs felt better today and I was able to stay near the front and even helped push the pace at times. Unfortunately, I kind of ran out of gas in the last hour and ended up falling off the front group. I tried to latch on to the Weyen Machine as he (it?) cruised by after a mechanical. Unfortunately, I could barely hang on. Then when we were only 40 meters from the front group, there was a flurry of attacks and they sped off into the distance. Of course, Weyen was able to reach them and proceed to get 3rd!

After that, I was just spent and rode tempo just to get to the finish. I could feel my body start to bonk and was dreaming about stopping and just lying down on the roadside. But I kept chugging along. Then I was swept up by a decent-sized chase group. But after taking only three pulls I was done…all I could do was hang onto to the back of them. Since were were just racing for 10th place or so at the time we just all rolled in together without much of a sprint.

So despite a major fade in the last hour of the race, I was happy with my performance.

Full results on Spondoro:
http://www.spondoro.com/results/BirdsOfPrey/2009/results.pdf