Westlake #4

The "A" group included somewhere between 30 and 50 riders. The "B" field had about 11. Rick Adams was in town from California with Ellsworth Bikes demo units. He had some nice looking machines, including a funky beach cruiser. I'll have to take a look at their web site sometime soon; He provided some extra primes for the fields to suffer for.

The police officer who normally marshalls one of the turns was a no-show, deer were browsing around the course, and the city placed a traffic barrel in the right gutter of the finishing straight, so it was important to pay attention to the road!

I felt pretty good and relaxed at the start of the neutral lap. We rolled around the course toward the start/finish and an attack went away almost immediately. I waited a too long before I decided to try to jump across, but managed to latch on anyway. However, the field gelled again. As usual, over the first several laps, several attacks went and the speed was pretty when the field tried to reel them in. The speed bounced into the 30s at least once a lap. (I think I need an 11 cog.) Eventually, a couple groups got up the road. A two man break, and a chase group.

I felt good, so I decided to try to bridge to the chase group, which was still only about 20 seconds up the road, and the speed of the field had dropped to about 25 mph. I didn't really attack, I just lifted my pace and moved up the left side of the field through the start finish hoping to get some help. I kept the pressure on through turn one, and saw a couple wheels behind me. As we rounded turn two, I was off with a group of three, but we didn't have much of a gap. After one rotation through, the field had caught us, but at least we chewed a pretty good divet out of the chase group's gap.

Once the field caught us, I eased up just a little, and found myself drifting toward the back rapidly. Someone was kind enough to shout out to me to latch on, so I accelerated a bit and was safely back in the draft. Whew!

I decided to just hang out in the field. I felt pretty good for the next 45 minutes or so. Finally, swinging onto Ranney Parkway with 7 laps to go, I really plowed into a pothole. It actually hurt my wrists. That broke my rhythm and I sat up briefly. A gap opened, and as in week 2, I didn't blow up, I just couldn't muster the will to close it. Ding! Race over just like that.

I rode another couple easy laps with another B-turned-A rider who had been dropped, but my lower back was seriously fatigued, so I just pulled over and watched the finish.

I stayed in for an hour and six minutes, 15 laps, about 30 miles at an average speed of 26.1 mph. The power average was just 237 Watts, since I was drafting most of the time. There were several high intensity efforts between 30 seconds and a minute, and the typical sprint out of turn two every lap.