Training Race

Yesterday morning I woke up to find it had snowed overnight. The grass and roofs were white but nothing on the streets. The sun came out pretty soon and it was a nice but cool day. I went over at lunch to do the training race. When I first started riding, my knee felt like it had a little inflammation but after 10 minutes I didn’t think about my knee until after the ride so it’s doing pretty good. Today Dr. Wood worked on it again and he said it’s moving better than it was on Tuesday.

I think we had 16 people show up was a big group for open streets. There a 4 traffic lights on the course. Two are at small side streets and they only turn red if there’s a car on the side street. The other 2 are at busier intersections but we are making a right turn. On the first lap the light was red at one and we blew right through it making the turn because the way the light is there’s no way for traffic to be going where we were turning. Just after we turned, we heard a loudspeaker behind us and a cop telling us how we broke the law and he could give each of us a $100 ticket. After lecturing us, he asked us to give him a thumbs up that we understood what he had said. After that he went on his way. We clearly broke the law and normally I’m very careful to obey traffic laws because I don’t want to give cyclist a bad image. In a group it’s sometimes easy just to not pay attention to the laws plus it wasn’t a safety issue.

I felt good and rode well and was only a few seconds off the leaders after the first climb. A couple other guys and I were able to get back to the leaders just after the descent making a lead group of 6. I was able to stay in the group a little over half way up the second time until Rob from RockShox picked the pace up. I was the first to go but pretty much right away nobody was left on anybody else’s wheel. Damon and Rob from RockShox finished 1st and 2nd in the Industry Cup cross-country at Sea Otter and Damon also finished 2nd in the downhill. I was able to catch my teammate Will on the flat. We were chasing our teammate Dan when Damon flatted and crashed and Dan stopped to check on him. I dropped Will just before we started the climb for the last time. I then caught Nathan who was in 2nd place about half way up the hill. I was surprised that he was riding like he had blown. I went by him but he soon came back by and I had no answer. He knew he couldn’t catch Rob and he didn’t think anybody would catch him from behind so he had eased up.

I ended up 3rd but I’m pretty sure Damon and probably Dan would have been ahead of me if Damon hadn’t crashed. I finished in 36:50 which I think was about one and a half minutes faster than I’ve done it this year. I managed to have an average heart rate of 178 and maxed it at 192.

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