tst
hellish race out there at tahuya this weekend. started the race with a mild drizzle and temperatures in the low forties. i was pretty warm, so i wasn't too worried. the race starts off going up and i wasn't feeling sweet but i was riding at the front and doing just fine. somebody managed to sneak off the front and i followed a move by jonny sundt to bridge. i was feeling like absolute crap though and i quickly realized that i had little to offer. it was too bad too, because this would have been a great move. if i'd been going well, we'd probably have caught the guy in front of us and actually built a sizable lead. as it was sundt (with a little help from me) built a lead of a little over a minute on the pack.
by the time that i was off with sundt i was soaked all the way through. damn. i couldn't see either. glasses were fogged and i was pretty much riding blind. that's a scary thing going downhill at 40 mph. i was getting so cold that i couldn't shift with my fingers and had to use my whole hand to move the shifter. quite awkward.
by this time the temps were down to 34° and it was snowing. we were caught just at the bottom of the first real climb of the day. i held on for a while at the front but i couldn't match an acceleration and slid backwards. at the top i got off my bike to hop into the car of the corner marshalls at that corner. but there was no car. i rode downhill to the next corner and found myself shivering so violently as the wind whipped through all three layers down to my skin that my bike was shaking enough to make me fear that i might lose control and fall off. i was able to hop into the nice car of my teammate brian burton and start to warm up a bit. heated seats and a blanket. ah yeah! of course, i was still shivering violently but i was warmed up an hour later!
tough to race under those conditions when you've been sick. not much to be done about it. i probably could have stuck it out, but given my shaky health, i thought that unwise. in a month i'm heading to arkansas to race and the state road race is in three weeks. no point in jeopardizing all that.
more photos at mike hone's flickr site
