First Stage race of the season...

The early break...

Glad that's done with!

bolstered only Alex and I in the pro 1,2's. Things went real well with Alex taking the overall lead after breaking away in the final 10k of the first road race and taking the stage win. I came in 6th for the first race. That evening was about a 10k TT which Alex took 2nd in and I pulled 23rd or 24th (something like that) and a minute down of first... I didn't really care after getting docked 20 seconds for improper number placement (and barely making it to the start on time)... Real time was quite an improvement based on what I'm used to seeing... Sunday's race was 95 miles and turned into something epic. My job was to take any time bonuses at the hot spot from anyone in contension... A break of two went on the first of 6 laps and the Hot Spot was on the 2nd lap, so that one couldn't get away. I bridged up to it and took the Hot spot and we kept going till the moto ref came up to tell us the time gap was up to 3 minutes on the field. This was no good as one of the guys was 1:40 down on Alex, to make things worse 3 more strong time trialists came across the gap to our break to pick up the pace even more. I stopped pulling and crossed my fingers, hoping the gap would come down enough so Alex's G.C. contension wasn't threatened. With about a lap and half left in the race, the gap came down to around a minute and Alex came across with another one of the strong guys in the race. I did as much as I could to keep him out of the wind, but after spending about 70 miles off the front my legs weren't having anymore. I did all I could then dropped back to the pack, which began chasing hard, leaving me hanging by a thread. Then a gap gets opened right in front of me in a tough crosswind section, I grit my teeth and slowly close it, then another gap opens... I go a little deeper into that cave of pain... and close it ever so slowly... Bullets are running real low and I'm having to shoot them left and right just to stay in the pack. Finally things calmed down by the last lap, giving me a chance to recover from the days effort thus far. I recover enough to try a last ditch effort to gain a few seconds on everyone else in the field. I went with one other guy and got a pretty healthy gap with about 2k to go, only to get caught in the last 100 meters and receive the same time as everyone else... Erik Saunders once told me, "you gotta risk losing to win sometimes"... Anyways, Alex went on and took 2nd that day and won the overall by a pretty good time gap, way to go man!