This weekend was the last race in the early season block-Chattanooga. What started in Powder Springs at the Tundra Time Trial ended with an Omnium event on both sides of the Georgia/Tennessee border.
A few thoughts on the racing. I decided to race with the Masters field to see if I was ready to do that full time and to see if I should ask to cat up. If I go by my time trial results that answer is an unqualified yes. It was my best TT to date on a power-style course and I won my classification and took second overall if you take out the Pro/1/2 field. I beat all the 3's and most of the 2's which was the best I've done all year. On the downside, I got dropped in both the crit and the road race events which means that I'm probably not quite ready to move up yet. So, I'll race the next quarter with the 4's and see if I can improve both my crit skills and my short term power in order to be able to hang with the surges. I have a ton more long term power than most of the guys I'm racing with but I don't have the same power for stuff under about 6 minutes.
For the first three months of racing I have to be pretty pleased. Five wins for five in the time trials I finished (and I'm sure I would have won the TT I flatted in), a podium in a road race and a podium in an omnium are good results. I still need a lot of improvement to get to my goal of making cat 3 but I can see winning the state TT championship from where I'm at. I still think I need to improve some things but some of that is equipment that I'll be able to invest in over the next two months and some will come with the eight weeks of training I'll get to do. My biggest concern is that some of the guys racing in the Pro/1/2 field are going to be in the 40-44 age group with me when the state TT happens and so I do have to race them and so I need to improve a bit more.
Right now I'm wiped out. I'm sore in a dozen places from this weekend's racing on top of the last three months. As physically tired as I am, I'm just as exhausted mentally. Racing takes a mental toll on you as you deal with the stress of worrying about crashing, staying in hotel rooms a lot and eating out too much. Staying home last week was a really big help and I'm looking forward to not doing a mass start race until late May. April and May is crit season down here in the south with some NRC events and a big crit series spread through the cities of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Alabama. For me, I'll have a couple of time trials before then but they're a lot easier to deal with and the travel requirements are pretty light. If we can ever get some weather conducive to riding outside (which would not be today with our 40 mph winds), I'm really looking forward to going out and getting reacquainted with some of the local roads.
At what's just about the halfway mark of the season, I'm happy with what I've accomplished but there's still a lot more to do. Thanks for reading and I'll check back in soon.
