How's Your Weekend?

Route 2 hates me. Last year a tiny tiny little glass shard was the undoing of my rear wheel, roughly halfway through stage 3. Flat, half hour chasing back on, lose two minutes up the climb because I was blown and on a smaller cassette than I'd planned to use.

This year, the comedy of errors unfolded like this: me drinking on Route 2, about 1 hour into a ~ 3 hour race. Pothole. A few brief moments of riding the bull and then get her straightened out and the guy to my left says "Jeez I hope you didn't flat there!". Thanks, guy. Thanks a lot. Two seconds later, the rear flat is obvious. Pull over, wheel from the truck. Fairly quick change but something's off. The neutral wheel was at about 40 psi - way way lower than even I like it. And it was hissing. Wheel truck was pulled over helping another guy (rte 2 hates many) so lucky for me, and I get another rear. Get going, something's still wrong. Front's flat. Truck is helping yet another guy, so I go grab my wheel and link up with a guy and we go full gas for a while and eventually catch three others. One guy drops. For a few minutes we are doing well, hearing that we are 1' back. As I said yesterday, lies - all lies. We get to the first kom (where I flatted last year) and they tell us 5:25 is the gap. One guy quits and now we're back to three. We pick up another but he can't pull, then one guy takes a huge pull up a rise and it's down to me and him.

We go through a lot of groups, sometimes gaining followers but never anyone who will pull. He drops me on Baby Gap (I'm worked) as we catch two more. The new guys not only won't pull they won't even pedal if I put them in front, so I get angry and drop them between Baby and App Gaps. Then I suffer my ass off alone up App Gap, wanting only for those two guys not to catch me.

260w average for two straight hours, 285np for the same, 930kj/hr over that time, and that ignores the first third of the day. I was pretty crushed from the effort. If today is dry we will enjoy a nice crit. If its wet, we will enjoy Mai-tais.