High Desert Omnium Crit

Today was a first for me; I pulled out of a race.  If you've followed this at all you know I hate quitting.  I'll ride off the back of a race for 5 hours by myself or drag my broken bike through 2 miles of mud just so I don't have to see that dreaded DNF next to my name.



Today was different.  Forgive me but I'm going to revert to engineer mode for this story.  For all of you without an engineering/metallurgy background, forgive me.  Two weeks ago my legs felt like this:

Pearlite; source:  http://hsc.csu.edu.au/

Everything was in order, I felt awesome, I was climbing well, I was finishing in the lead group and most of all my legs felt awesome.  Then I trained and my legs felt like this:

Martensite; source:  www.threeplanes.net

You see how all those nice, pretty lines aren't there anymore?  Exactly.  My legs feel like someone did this to them:

So, no training for a few days and hoping to get my legs back to looking something like this:

Bainite; source:  http://tadg.org

No, not quite as nice as the pearlite, but getting there.  That was the plan, this is how they felt about 20 minutes into the crit:

sorry, glass not iron this time.
source:  www.wallpaperweb.org

On the team side of things we didn't do too bad, Adam was able to snag one of the $50 primes and we think we got Bedford a 2nd place.  Boone got a little caught up in the action and soloed off the front a little early, winning the second-to-last lap.  See, these crit things are confusing...

In short, I can only exert about a 5-8 second effort when I'd normally be able to throw down a 30-45 second  effort again and again.  It's really frustrating because this time last year I was just hitting a peak, this was my first 3 race and I actually scored my highest placing at this race.  Fast forward to this year and you see a cracked racer who can't even hold on in a relatively easy 50 minute crit.  Regardless, I'm going to go out and give the team everything I've got tomorrow and take a nice long break and organize for cyclocross season.  on that note I give you this:

USGP Stanley Portland Cup day 1 from mark colton on Vimeo.

Oh, and stay tuned for an update about the awesome wheels I may be rocking this cx season!