St Leon + The week leading up to it.

That's my week and my result. Dumpster.

I hate making excuses for bad performances, so I'm going to get this out of the way first: I've been battling a chest cold all week. I don't feel super super bad, but my immune system is definitely on the ropes and I haven't had quality sleep for 5 nights now. My nights have mostly been 2-5hrs of coughing bouts, then finally falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up coughing again... My training for this week was so/so at bet, which isn't a huge problem because I have a solid base, but still a little unnerving.
So we headed to St. Leon. This race suits me and I usually do pretty well there. Very weirdly though, on the car trip over I started feeling nauseous. I haven't felt nauseous at all this week while sick so it struck me as odd. My guess is it was just my system being "off kilter" and the motion sickness symptoms creeping on me (I don't really ever get motion sickness BTW) .
Anywho, it was raining when we lined up to start and I really had no idea how I was going to fare.

I had my teammate set me up to hit the climb at the front of the race. A few kamikaze pilots took off around me on the climb, but I wasn't worried much about them. I was feeling okay, and started to look for a move. A few came and went quickly and then Ryan Shanahan went. I know he packs a lot of horsepower, so I jumped as hard as I could to get up to him. Once I made contact we were gone. We did 1 lap w/ just the two of us and we got over a minute on the field. Then on the second climb Jon Atwell bridged to us making it a 3man break w/ some real firepower.
Us three worked together well and got 3-4minutes on the field. As far as all were concerned, the race behind was for 4th...so it seemed. I came unhitched from the break midway through one lap to go. We had enough of a gap that I wasn't overly worried; I should be able to hang on to third. I kept riding but I was slowly dying and quickly slowing. Still though, I reached the bottom of final climb alone and couldn't see the group behind; I still had hope. But no legs. I went up the hill the final time at 4-5mph turning squares. But I was still clear of the field...until I reached the top.

I was picked up just as I crested the climb and I didn't even have enough gas to get on a wheel to ride the ~1mile to the finish. I limped in for 17th after spending 2.5hrs in a breakaway. I fell apart like I've never fell apart in a race before. That's the breaks though. Sometimes when you go all in you loose. Andi lost big time. I do believe if I had gone in healthy I would have hung and had a better day. But ending a week of sickness w/ 3hr hard road race is putting your fate to the wind.
Oh well. The results sheet are all that really matter in the end and I have a terrible result. But I put in a great effort and great ride.
Today (Sunday) I made the explicit plan to do nothing but rest all day to get rid of this cold. I took two naps and just sat around all day. Hopefully I have this thing licked.
I don't have a lot of racing on my calendar for May so I want to get some quality training in. This race (St. Leon) always feels like the end of the true road season for me. From here it's mostly criterium racing around here and I don't generally care for criterium style racing. So from May on it's typically the odd road race I can find but mostly MTB and TT racing for me. Then after a couple months of that it's time to be thinking about the Cyclocross season. One step at a time though. It needs to dry up enough to be able to even ride MTB's, let alone race them!