Out Like a Lion Weekend

Posted by Dan on 23. March 2009 23:49

Great weekend down in NC. Two races this weekend with a Road Race on Saturday and a Criterium on Sunday. I traveled down to NC with my buddy Kyle and got in some great racing.

Saturday was the Out Like a Lion Road Race in New London, NC. They had a great course set up with about 6.5 mile loops giving us a fairly short 35 mile RR. Nothing too special about the course, it contained a few turns and hills, only one of which was anything more than a power man's hill. Sure enough on the second lap two groups of eight got away with about 15 seconds in between the two, seeing that this might be a pretty significant split in the field I moved up in our group and bridged across to the first group. Moving up was rather difficult with 85 riders in the field and only one lane of road to ride on, fortunately decent positioning and fitness allowed me to move across the moves. As I latched onto the back of the first group we were approaching the bottom of the main climb, the pace slowed as the pain was starting to set in across the group. Sensing that the pace was slowing I moved to the front and shot off, no one was able to follow. As I crested the top of the climb I held about a 15 second gap, after looking back and seeing no one chasing I decided to give em all I had a keep going; about 5 miles later two others bridged up giving us a group of three, the two others were Kyle Knott from Tripower and Dan from Traveller's, both of them are good friends which was encouraging and gave me confidence. We got the gap up to about a minute until the Bojangle's breakfast set in and made its own decision that the break was no longer going to gain momentum. So after about 13 miles off the front our group no longer had the gas. The last turn before the sprint was about 3 K to go, making it interesting as that is significantly longer than anything I had ever done. With the yellow line rule and 85 guys vying for the front things got hectic. Sitting in about 40th wheel Kyle and myself gave it full gas with about 300 meters to go and pulled 4th and 9th respectively. Fairly content with the result given the amount of time off the front, should've gone sooner though since we both think we had much more sprint left in the tank.

Sunday was a really cool crit course in Hurley Park, Salisbury. The Carolina Masters Cycling Team did a great job of putting on the race. The course was flat except for the finishing straight which had a two-tiered climb to the finish and then a crazy fast descent to the first turn. I felt pretty terrible for the first half as I was dumb and got no warmup. I only felt decent after the halfway point when the organizers put in three priems back to back and one guy slipped away. Kyle gave it the gas with about two to go on a solo move to catch the single leader. Kyle actually put in a great move to catch the guy with about 50 meters to go to snag the win, leaving a bunch sprint for third. Going into the last corner I sat about 20th-ish wheel, as soon as we turned the corner I gave it full throttle all the way up the hill. I was going as hard as I could and it was almost enough. I lost the field sprint for 3rd buy about an inch, after checking the video of the finish it was confirmed that I didn't get it. I'm somewhat disappointed in not getting it after a sprint that felt as good as it did but you gotta be happy with fourth in a tough race.

Jon Safka was at the race taking pics, hopefully he'll have em up soon and I can get some posted here. He does some great work, can't wait to see what turns up on this weekend's races. Check him out at: www.cyclingphotos.ca