St. Leon RR RR

St. Leon Road Race Race Report.

Awesome day of racing. It was the first really hot day of the year and we had 4 ~18mile laps on tap for a 70+ mile RR; long by Cat3 standard. The course was changed from years past and included a brutal climb that I'm guessing was once paved, but now is mostly just crumbled asphalt, sand and gravel. In other words, totally awesome!
I knew this course would suit me well and I was feeling good going in. I generally do well in the heat, but being the first hot day, I wasn't sure how I would handle it. And having raced St. Leon before, I know the course somewhat, but 1) it was different as I mentioned and 2) I hadn't raced there for 2 years I think.
My ~plan~ was to hit the climb hard the first lap and try to whittle the field down to maybe 10 or so. As we approached the climb me and my teammates moved to the front and I attacked out of the group to try to break up the field. The move worked better than I planned and better than I had hoped. It turned out just one other guy followed the pace and we found ourselves w/ a large gap over the field that was growing. We decided to keep drilling the pace and if anyone was bridging, we would slow to get a few more bodies in the break. No one bridged and it was a 2 man break for the remainder, which was ~60+miles. I had no real desire to ride at breakaway effort for 3hrs, but that's just the way it played out (for non cyclists: breakaway riding is harder than "normal" riding. You have to ride hard at the front w/very little rest between your hard efforts. The more people, the more rest, the easier it is. If you're alone, there's no rest, w/ two there's very little rest, w/ three a little bit more...etc). We motored on and built a lead of almost 10minutes on the field.

(leading through the start/finish on lap # ?)

There's a decently hard, but much shorter hill about a mile from the finish and on the last lap I decided that I needed to attack my "break mate" there, since I have no sprint. I went, but I could hear his creaky bottom bracket right behind me, so I knew my chance of winning was slimmer than I wanted it to be. I was outkicked at the line and beaten by ~2bike lengths. All in all a great day though; super hard racing, how it should be.
I had some very solid training over the past couple weeks (when it wasn't raining!) and some more n tap. I'm going all right right now. Hopefully it lasts.