Dog tired...

I'm beat! Did this local Kermesse yesterday about 30 kilometers from where I'm living that was about 100k long... I rode to and from the race to get a few extra miles (I'm kind of trying to get in 1 or 2 100 mile days a week in preparation for hotter n hell and nationals...), I was aiming for 160k... With the race being around 100k, that was about right... The course was a 9 kilometer loop that we did 11 times with each lap having 4 climbs, one of which was cobbled. Some strong guys showed up making it a pretty tough race... I think we were off the gas for about 5 minutes of the whole race... I ended up bridging up to a group that was chasing the break on the first lap and by the end of that first lap, we were able to tag on the back of the break. It was more like a split in the field based off the size of the break, but it didn't happen that way... A small group here and there came across one at a time... We had about 40 guys at the end of 2 laps, then at about 6 laps in it went super hard and lost a pretty good chunk of riders... I managed to barely hang on through that bit... I was trying to sit back and do the least amount of work as possible, but it didn't seem to matter... Guys were opening gaps as guys were attacking on the front and everybody else was trying to do the least amount of work too, so many times I had to ride across gaps if I wanted to stay in the race. It was kind of a catch 22.. If you were in the front half of the break, you had to follow the attacks and if you were in the back half, you got stuck closing gaps... Either way, you had to do a lot of work... I eventually cracked with 2 laps to go and fell off the back with a few other guys... I managed to follow one of the guys attacks on the last lap dropping the other guys with us, but couldn't take the guy I was with at the end... I rolled across in 24th place and pretty hammered... It was another hot day, leaving me feeling a bit dehydrated at the end of the day... My climbing seemed to be a little better, I think the biggest help for me is doing races that have lots of climbs... and drilling it up them... I looked at yesterday as a good day of hill repeats, which is what I need...

Today, I had to be at the national team house to pre-ride the course for the race on Saturday at the ripe time of 7:45... I was still pretty tired from the previous day and the last thing I wanted to go do was get up at 7:00... But, I wanted to pre-ride this course so I knew what to expect in the race. My biggest pitfalls have been positioning before climbs, so if I could know what to expect on the climbs, I think I can do a bit better... Although, after pre-riding that course I'm going to need a little more than a wing and a prayer to get over those climbs... Most of the race is pretty easy, but there is 20k that is un-godly hard... The first climb is about 2 miles long and all cobbles, then there is another one about 5k after that, that is about 1.5 miles long and pretty steep, then a few kilometers after that there is one that gradually gets steeper for about a mile before it shoots you on to a 500-800 meter very steep cobbled climb... and of course there is always guys that want to go hard up these things... The first climb, I sat back with one of the other guys who was hurting and tired too... But after Noel told us we were to slow and that it took us 3 minutes to catch the guys where they stopped to refill bottles and that was not good... So... as tired as I was, I made sure I stayed as close to the guys hammering up the climbs as I could... I didn't really want to ride very hard today, but whatever... sometimes you gotta do that stuff... It'll just make my coffee shop ride that much more enjoyable tomorrow...