This weekend was the official road race kick-off for me. I signed up for the Omnium at the Perry-Roubaix, "Hell of the Middle", race weekend held about an hour south of here. The Omnium consisted of a morning time trial which was a middle distance affair, an afternoon circuit race around a 2 mile loop and Sunday road race of about 50 miles. I signed up to do the Cat IV races because I need to get the upgrade points and I haven't done a mass start race since last May. If you're wondering about the name for the race, the races were held around Perry, Georgia and the 12.5 mile road race course actually had 2 miles of dirt road we had to traverse. More on that in a bit.
Saturday morning came pretty early and as we pull up to the start area for the TT the wind was already blowing at about 10 miles an hour. We'd have a tail wind the entire way out but when we turned around we'd ride back into it. This would prove decisive. I set up Spinblade and proceeded with my warm up. I got to the line and took off and realized that I was, as long as the wind was at my back, Lance. There were several places where I was pushing my 54/11 which meant I was doing in excess of 40 mph. I was climbing hills at a scary speed of over 25 mph. Then I turned arouond and hit the wall of wind that had been my friend just minutes before. The problem here is that I'm a smaller guy and we little guys don't do so well in the wind and was definitely the case here. I managed a second place finish but I was disappointed by the fact that I had done so well at Tundra and then faltered here. I believe the combination of the wind and a few training let ups where responsible. The guy who won was about 3 inches taller than me and a good bit broader so the advantage in the wind went to him.
The Circuit Race was a pretty interesting affair due to the now howling wind. By the time we went off it was 20 mph with gusts up to 30. By the time the pro/1/2 guys would go off late in the day it would be sustained at 30. We started with around 35 guys and for the first 3 laps things remained pretty boring with a small two man break getting off the front and being left to dangle. On lap number four I decided to shake things up and attacked on the stretch of road that was into the wind and then turned onto the long 2% uphill drag. It was a text book attack and I had about 15 seconds pretty quick. I didn't expect to really get away but I wanted to see what everyone had. When the pack got back up to me there were only 18. I had split the field and made the race. That was cool. Over the next couple of laps my team chased the break to try and set up our sprinter. We did some pretty impressive work and I think the rest of the field noticed. In the end I finished 14th which is great for me since I can't sprint. The picture is of me coming up over the top of the long climb on one lap. You can see how much I'm enjoying the wind.
Sunday's road race was held over a really great course. We had two pretty solid climbs and some rollers but the highlight was the two miles of dirt road we had to negotiate. The cool thing about the dirt is that I sort of felt like I was doing one of the spring classics where there was a race to get a good position going into the dirt and then a lot of single file hard riding. I split the field again with an attack on the climbs on the second lap and then did a lot of work for the team through the rest of the race. I tried to set a guy up for a final breakaway on the last lap but he didn't really seem to have the ability to make anything of it. He could hold wheels and push a bit on the climbs but he couldn't seemt o do much on the flats. Anyways, I ended up finishing 11th and 6th overall in the Omnium which was pretty good considering.
Today will be a recovery ride and then I'll head back into hard training. The one thing that I didn't like was that I didn't seem to have the "extra gear" I needed at some points and I think some hard interval training will help that.
Thanks for Reading.
