March 20th Tucson Bike Classic Circuit Race

Well, today didn't exactly go as planned, but I did give it a good effort, just a bit late though.

We had a 45 mile circuit race on tap, which bascially climbed up, and then came down for 8 laps. My goal was to mark the guy in second place for the first part of the race and see what happened. On the second lap, he attacked really hard and I was forced to respond. Noone seemed to care that he had gone, but as soon as I jumped, they were on me like white on rice. Twice I had to bridge gaps due to bad positioning and both times I knew I was making myself work more than I should. For the next lap I stayed glued to his wheel.

A break got away on the end of the 2nd lap, which I wasn't completely aware of. By lap 4, they had almost 2 minutes on the group. I went to the front and started rotating pulls, but noone really wanted to chase. The guy in second place took, probably 2 pulls and fell back into the pack.

As my frusteration mounted I figured I had to do something. On the 7th lap, I attacked and crushed the climb, one guy was able to get up to me, and proceeded to sit on my wheel. As we hit the downhill, he started to pull through a little, but his pace was weak. I figured this was the time to go all in, and I basically just Time Trialed for the next lap. We picked up 2 stragglers from the break, who also proceeded to sit on my wheel and not help! The final lap I would say I pulled 99.5 percent of the time, power on the climb was well over 400 watts and only dropped to about 390 for the downhill. I brought back some time, but nowhere near enough to hold the lead. All in all, I made my move way to late.

I have never been in a race where the riders in the top 10, who are only separated by maybe 30 seconds, have no desire to work??!! They were content to just let their GC hopes go down the drain. Maybe they were just that weak or already at their limit, but it was unbelievable. I made a bad assumption in thinking that they would care, so I waited to long to chase the break. I felt amazing, and had no doubt that I was the strongest rider in the race. Tactically, I made some errors though and it cost me.

At the end, I finished 3rd overall. Not exactly what I had hoped for but I guess its a good place to start. Now I got 4 more days of good training and then its back to Colorado.

Thanks everyone for all the support!