Monday, October 17, 2011

Hilly 100 + hometown racing = busiest weekend of my life!

Hilly 100 weekend is always the busiest weekend of the year for me. Usually there's a race on Hilly weekend, but I miss it because Hilly is good money and pretty fun to work. This year the race was in Bloomington though, so the bright idea was to take the busiest work weekend of the year and add a race onto the end of it. What could go wrong?
Well, I happily report nothing did go terribly wrong. Hilly was busy; the weather was great. It was joking being referred to as the "Windy 100" because there was some serious wind all weekend. I honestly felt bad for the folks out riding the Hilly. It was consistent 40+mph gusts and heavy sustained. Needless to say the Hilly tent was taking a beating. But all that aside, it was a good Hilly.
The race.
I'm normally a zombie on Sunday afternoon of Hilly weekend. SO I went into Bloomingcross with a 0 on the expectation meter. I hoped to finish. I did a few laps to preview the course and realized that there were ~zero technical aspects to the course. It was wide opened and mostly long sweeping turns. A "roadie" course if you will. I was hoping for a more "techie" course because being on my feet and repetitious heavy lifting ought to have had less effect on my handling ability than my pedaling ability. But it wasn't to be so all I could do was go Leroy Jenkins on that mother.
(Josh and I spent a lot of time together this weekend)

Despite what I would call a so/so season I have maintained my front row call-up spot thus far. That being the case, I had a pretty good start and felt pretty good for the first couple of laps. But eventually I completely lost track of laps and the race seemed to be going on forever. Due to the lack of technical aspect in the course, I was caught around riders with little technical ability, but that can pedal well. They were slowing me way down in nearly every corner, but I couldn't get around them once out of the corner.
The barriers here were super tall and I had to channel both Lolo Jones for hurdling prowess and Blanka Vlasic for the height. Seriously, I had to actually jump to get over these.

My Race ended up between my buddy Will and I. It was a good battle and he got the better of me by half a wheel at the line. I ended up 15th.
We all went out for Mexican afterwards and it was a good time. Also, with another group of friends we went out for Thai food Friday night. So yeah, a pretty killer weekend.
There are no OVCX races this weekend, so I'm taking the weekend off of racing and I'm taking the week off of training. I'm going to ride, but no intervals, or any of that mess. Just a few rides and an extra day off. It's been a busy season already, I feel like a little break will do me some good.

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