The good, the bad, and the not so ugly...

Well, I am real happy with how I did this past weekend at Iowa City.

I traveled to Iowa City on Thursday to spend some time with my family who currently reside there. The weather both days was far from nice. Thunderstorms and flooding were abounding in eastern Iowa. The outlook for the weekend wasn't looking much better with high winds and not so warm temperatures. Though they did end up slightly warmer than the Lincoln Spring Classic weekend. At least the sun was out.

Saturdays road race was fun. My plan was to go out and do my best. Armed with a new mantra and a plan I was ready to race. With the winds coming out of the west at over 20 mph, the plan was to shield myself in the pack as best I could. My positioning was mostly in the top 10, a couple of times I found myself getting too close to the front and I was not going to attempt any pulling, not with those winds, so I just relegated myself a few places back. One lap down and I am still in the pack, this was looking good, I was feeling real good. Before it was always a struggle to keep with the pack, now I can see some improvement. Halfway through the second lap, I am still there. There was a turn south and up a nice little hill. Here things weren't looking very good. I couldn't drop out of my large chain ring to climb the hill. This had the effect of people passing me and slowly falling off the back. I knew that as soon as I topped the hill there was a turn east and a nice tailwind to assist me in catching back on. I laid the hammer down and was able to gap the 100 or so yards and get back into the pack. Here I was able to relax myself a little and get some water. There was then a turn south with a turn west about 100 yards down. When we turned west and went up a small climb, I fell off just enough to get slammed by the winds. A few other had dropped off too and we had a small train of 6 of us working together to try and catch back up and make a good showing of it. We made it 3/4 of the way through the last lap when I made a seriously bad mistake. I just finished pulling and was letting everyone move up. I knew who the last guy was and was waiting for him. He was about a bike and a half back and when he came up said, "They don't want to work with us any more" I should have looked back and or just grabbed the wheel when I noticed a gap. In those windy conditions it was pretty much hopeless for me to catch back on, so I time trialed it to the finish. I think there was close to 40 some people who started and only 27 of us finished in the cat 4 race. I ended up 22nd. I was really happy with myself and was feeling real good and looking toward the crit on Sunday.

With my family out watching the race on Sunday, I was looking forward to putting the same amount of effort into the race as I did on Saturday. The objective was to do my best, not get lapped, and not crash. Well, needless to say only one of those things came off as planned. Right at the start we went down hill and had to take a right hand turn. Not really sure how it happened, I may have gotten a little titchy, and may be I tried to turn to soon or too sharply but down I went, thankfully I didn't hit anyone else or cause any other accidents. My shorts were torn up and there was some blood on my leg and elbow. The injuries I was able to ignore. Picked up my bike, fixed the shifter and everything seemed to check out. So I ran up the hill with my bike in hand and heading for my free lap.

I'll be darned if I was going to go out that easily. I got back in the race and just did what I could. My drive seemed to have been slightly diminished since I was spending so much time trying to figure out what went wrong and every subsequent time around that corner I became overly cautious. Not sure how many laps I was able to get in before getting lapped and subsequently being pulled from the race. I then went down to the first aid station and got patched up.

All-in-all it was a great weekend. Next year I will be better. Congratulations to everyone else who raced and did well this weekend. Bryan (who has a great write up about the weekend, not to mention his grammar is much better. hehe) , Janna, Sydney, and Marc and all the others who raced.