Starcrossed: Damn, Belgians are fast.

Here’s what I learned today:  if you eat Belgian waffles every morning you can make a bike go really fast.  Heck, even ex-dopers can’t keep up with you.

But seriously though, today’s race was awesome.  The course was bone-dry and super-fast; lots of bends and twisty-turnys but an all-around awesome course.  That said, I’m definitely not a fan of sand.  This course contained two sand sections, one which was mostly ridable and one that was unridable, unless you eat Belgian waffles every day. 

In keeping with my typical clusterf*** luck I dropped my bike on the drive-side, slightly bending the derailleur hanger.  Well that wasn’t part of the plan.  With my shifting slightly off my warmup went all according to plan but as soon as I put my rear wheel on and did a few openers I knew something was up.  Damn, broken spoke and 10 minutes to staging.  I was torn between riding the carbon tubular with a broken spoke or risk running a clincher with the same tread.  I opted for the clincher.  Good choice.

Start position 46 out of 60ish.  A small but relatively stacked field.  Looking around I recognized a lot of people near the front and not a whole lot around me.  That means one thing:  this is going to be one fast race.  Bam, gun goes off and we’re off.  As I enter the first corner and I look over to see that the leaders already have 15 seconds on me.  Holy crap, it’s been 100m and they’re really that far ahead?  Enter survival mode.  Because of my total lack of twitchy muscles at the moment I switched the diesel into overdrive and went after anyone I could see.  I settled into my rhythm and slowly picked people off.  I had trouble riding the sand section and lost a few seconds every lap but gained it back in other sections.  I wound up getting pulled with two laps to go because some waffle-eating fast dude was burning rubber behind me.  I really wanted one more lap but I’m pretty happy with my performance today.  I rode within myself and despite the equipment hiccup and poor start position I managed to ride my best race of the season.  No idea on placing but I’ll update it when I know.  It just started pouring so I’m sure whatever the course is tomorrow it’ll be drastically different from what we rode today.