Scene of the Crime

Next weekend is Coppi, a race I last did during my first year of racing. It was one of my first races as a 4, and my first go in a 3-4 race. I got killed. There were some mitigating circumstances (we were turning an old brick piece of crap into a very cool restaurant, a process which required profound physical input from me in the days leading up to the race - I was exhausted on the starting line), but even with that factor, it didn't go well. It was a wicked hot day, and the "feed zone through the hill after turn 1" part of the course was just killing me. Man did I struggle to stay in there, but finally on the last lap, coming out of the dirt, I raised the white flag. A minute or three later, my chain broke. I only remember doing one race after Coppi that year. This year, I'm registered for the Old Man 3-4 race, but will hope to get into the 3-4 off the wait list. It will be fun to come back to a race that kicked my ass so soundly a pretty long time ago.

Between then and now, we have Hagerstown and Capital Criterium this weekend. Both of these should be fun. Unless I've miraculously, through no conscious action, suddenly developed a bunch of abilities I didn't have at Reston, the best I can hope for is to do a lot more for my team mates than I did at Reston. It pissed me off to suck there, I should have been able to do much more. I just didn't have it.

Strange workout last night. The original plan was to put in another 20' interval on dirty Mac, then hit the Goon. My timing was bad for the Goon, so I wound up doing repeats on Ridge, which worked out well. Not sure that it makes any sense to do an LT interval (I matched my best 20' last night, even with a hopelessly chundered turnaround) followed by 5 VO2 intervals with short rest intervals, but that's what I did. The VO2 intervals were solid, I'm happy with recovery.

We booked the last room at The Guest House for Lost River weekend. It'll be strange to go back to that race and be just a random dude, but I'm really happy that NCVC continued with it, and that there's as much enthusiasm for it as there is. If we'd had the registration numbers at this point last year that they do so far this year, I would have gotten a lot more sleep than I did. Shit that was stressful.