As you may or may not know, it's the Hotter n Hell Hundred time of year again. Before I get started on a race report thus far, scope out this video from the local news station... did a little bit of a piece on hydration...
so... for the race report, last night was the first crit which saw some break aways which all seemed to come back. I soloed up to a break with Josh in it in the last 20 minutes of the race and immediately after tagging on had to go with another move that came from that break. I didn't think I could do it, but it helps when someone tells you to go... you just don't think about it, you just go and don't think about exploding. I eventually got up to the next group, when the games began and people started looking at each other to pull, creating a situation where no one was pulling. Luckily, Colt was up there from RBM (I wasn't racing for RBM for the HHH races, gotta race MSU), so I had a friend up there... We just wanted to stay away, so we just kept riding and before we knew it, it was just the two of us. We got a pretty good gap and I think we were pretty convinced that we stood a good chance of staying away. Four laps to go, the pack was out of sight until we hit the long straightaways. Three to go, a little closer. Two to go, a little bit closer (the gap seemed to close exponentially) but still a good gap and the crowd was going crazy! One to go, the crowd died down, letting me know that our efforts were pretty much futile... we tried to gas a bit more, but we were both dieing, We got swallowed up with a half a lap to go. Josh tried to get the sprint but pulled 5th, the last 2 corners mad the finish real tricky... to get primes, throughout the race I realized I couldn't be any further back than 2nd wheel going into that 2nd to last corner if I wanted to stand a chance at winning the prime...
Now for the road race this morning: Dude! We won! I don't really know what to say other than that... The team rode excellent, with snatching up hotspot sprint points where possible to get Josh the omnium lead and getting Josh to the hotspots first, allowing him to win two of the four. The rest of the time, we virtually always had a guy up the road keeping things easier for the rest of us. Lalla buried himself so deep in his barrage of attacks that he ended up in the first aid tent after the race hooked up to an IV... I gotta say, the team was awesome... and we got the right guy in the decisive move that went in the last 10 miles. Josh took the win and it was a very meaningful win for us. After yesterday's near miss, it was important to us to try to pull something off. Not to mention, no current MSU rider had won the hotter n hell road race before today. It wasn't just a win for the MSU cycling team, it was a win for the community that keeps us afloat! That became clear to me in the crit last night, the energy coming off the crowd was amazing and I felt like I let them down a little, so today was excellent!
oh yea.... we finished 100 miles in 3hrs 45 minutes...
on to tomorrow's final crit and hopefully an overall omnium win...
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