So obviously it's been a while since the last post. I owe that to a variety of reasons, mainly school getting incredibly busy over those weeks and my computer suffering massive injuries for warranty purposes. I'm going to try and give the best summary I can of those weeks, the races and what I've been up, while keeping it as short as possible.
Ok, races first:
-a week after the Sublimity Circuit race I raced in the Banana Belt series. This is a three-week series with awards going to the top 3 people in my category at the end of the series. At Banana Belt 1 (BB1) my teammate and I went out and pushed the pace the entire way. We were sick of the cat 5 BS of slowing down, attacking up the hills and just generally being pansies. To remedy this we went out and pushed the pace the entire way. My teammate ended up leading about 75% of the race while I attacked off the front to keep the pace up. Unfortunately, this pace dropped my other teammate (yeah, we actually had 3 of us out there!) which was his first race. Anyway, we pushed the entire way, one guy got away off the front in the final mile and I knew we had no chance of catching him. In the ensuing field sprint I ended up taking 2nd and my teammate (the one who led almost the entire way) ended up edging out a person to my left for third. Overall, a pretty good race for us. We raced really stupidly but we got a great workout in and were pretty happy with the final results.
-we were unable to participate in BB2 due to Spring Break. Aaron (my teammate) went home and I went to New Orleans (more on that later)
-BB3 (the final race of the series) went ok. I ended up racing it by myself because people were still out of town on Spring Break and I hadn't ridden my bike from Monday until Friday (this race was held on Sunday). When I was getting ready for this race something felt funny. I couldn't exactly pin it down but I knew something wasn't right, maybe it was just racing without a teammate or the fact that I hadn't really trained that week but something felt off. The race started out ok with me just sitting off the front and letting other people do the work. Having not ridden that week I knew it'd be stupid to try a solo break, especially since the Cat 5 guys don't let anything get away. I soon found out why I felt 'off.' On this course there's a downhill, off-camber 90 degree corner that has just a little bit of sand and gravel on it. Nothing happened on this corner the first two weeks but I knew if anything was going to happen, this is where it'd all go down. Turns out it did. Heading into the corner I had the outside line which would have allowed me to carry more speed through the corner and attack back into the pack should I need to. Just as I started the corner I head something off on my right. When I looked I saw a bike bouncing right to where I was about to turn. Instead of turning I headed straight and locked up the rear brake and turned away to avoid the crash. It's really hard to describe what happened but I was sitting on the top tube of my bike with the rear wheel locked up and skidding with my left foot unclipped and ready to catch me if I ended up going down. Long story short I didn't crash but the peleton attacked when they saw the crash, making it damn hard for me to regain contact. Luckily about 4 other riders were displaced by the crash but they helped me chase back on. We all ended up exerting a ton of energy doing this so I just sat of for the next lap. Then things started getting interesting. Heading up a small roller I was sitting on the wheel of a bigger guy right next to the centerline. I don't know if he braked or stopped pedaling but he started to slow down. To avoid crashing into his rear wheel I moved my front wheel just to the right of his rear wheel so our wheels were overlapping. Without signaling he moved to the right. This move really screwed me over because I was faced with the option of having my front wheel bumped (which would most likely end in a crash) or moving without looking (almost guaranteeing I would run into another rider). I opted for the possible front wheel bump. I positioned my body so I would be able to move my wheel behind his before my momentum would carry my wheel to the right. I was off by half an inch. As I moved my wheel behind his our tires clipped. This sent me careening into the left lane (a violation of the rules). As I tried to maintain balance i looked up and saw a white SUV heading at me at ~40mph--bad news. Again, I don't know exactly what happened but I managed to squeeze back over the centerline and into safety as the SUV passed. I received a centerline warning for that maneuver but escaped disqualification because it wasn't my fault and I did everything right. I ended up 7th on the day in a crappy field sprint but hey, I got the one point I needed to upgrade to Cat 4--that's all that really mattered. Overall, a terrible race but the bike and I survived and I somehow managed to pull out third overall in the series with only racing 2 of the 3, one of them crappy.
Ok, this one is getting really long so I'm going to cover New Orleans in a separate blog.
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