Wake Up Call

The euphoria that comes with "springing forward" comes with an unfortunate side effect--its sucks to lose an hour of sleep.  After a week of early wake up calls that left me groggy and annoyed, I figured what better way to get out of the "time-change funk" then make my 2011 road racing debut.  This proved to be another wake up call.

The Perry Road Race is a five mile circuit at Perry Lake that crosses the dam then circles back on the spillway before ascending a steep half-mile climb to repeat the process.  The race was seven laps, which is 35 miles to those who flunked algebra. 

The first lap felt like we started off pretty fast (but I didn't get too great of a warm up).  Then the second lap I settled in and starting feeling better.  So towards the end of the second lap, when five guys attacked, I was attentive, but didn't care too much at mile 10 of a 35 mile race--especially since the wind was howling and a breakaway seem destined to fail.

I noticed a guy in front of me, who was obviously trying to position himself in the pack to bridge up to the move.  I'd raced with him before and knew he was pretty strong so I figured, "what the heck?"  Sure enough, he tried to bridge.  Since I saw it coming a mile away I had no trouble keeping his wheel.  We immediately cut their lead from about 15 seconds to 7 or 8 seconds.  I looked over my shoulder and saw that we picked up another strong rider to make three chasers.  I pulled through several times and we were making steady progress on catching.  On about the third time I pulled through, I took my pull, then looked over my shoulder to see that my other two counterparts in the chase had sat up.  Unfortunately we were about 30 seconds away from the "dam hill" and I was feeling cooked.  I sat up and fell back into the peloton where I was immediately shot out the back on the hill like crap through a goose--the peloton picked up the pace and caught the five riders in the break on the hill.

I ended up riding the next two laps with two other riders that also got dropped.  We almost caught back onto the peloton but never quite made it.  With three laps to go, my group of three became a group of one, as I got dropped again on the hill.  I think the peloton slowed considerably with two to go because the two guys I road with eventually caught back onto the peloton.  Unfortunately, I road the final two laps solo--which sucked because it was windy as hell.  As usual, I continued my tradition of getting dropped in early spring races.  So it goes.  There's always next time.