Last Race of 2007?

Ventured up to the Ladera Grand Prix in Ladera Ranch. This was supposed to be a quick hour drive for me from the diggs here in willetts-burg...

No dice - traffic was pretty bad and it wound up taking me almost two hours to get to the race.

I haven't really been riding the bike much since I went to Cascade (which ended pretty poorly for me in what amounted to a case of a mistake being made by a confused/creative OBRA official...) - so I was eager to do a race with the goal being to get that bad taste of Cascade out of my mouth prior to gettin' on the ol' KJ train this fall/winter (one of my goals this fall is to drop another 3-4 kilos by Jan 1 - that'll be some serious work, so we'll see how that goes!).

Anyway, back to Ladera where I toed the line with a whoppin' 10-12 hours of bike ridin' in my legs in the last month...

Started at the back of the 40ish rider field after explaining to Eddie M. how one of the Willett's is much better at winning bike races than the other. hmmm... I wonder which I was referring to!

:-)

Yeah, so this course was deceptively tight - not much room for more than two abreast in any of the corners, and if you were on the outside you were pretty much taking your chances. Like five minutes into this thing, a buncha dudes were rolling up the road and I figgered I'd better cover anything that had good representation. Some guys were actively blocking (a pretty dipsticky thing to do, IMHO - a pet peeve of mine - it's pretty poor form to ride your brakes and take dumbass lines in a corner/just prior to a corner while on the front...) but I digress.

So, seein' as how I saw the beginnings of "Active Blocking" in the early laps as a dozen or more guys went up the road - I punched it just prior to turn 1, which is just about when someone on my left decided they were going to try and close the door on me. As I was going past this guy on his right (I think I came from something like third or fourth wheel) he made a sudden move to his right and we touched shoulders.

I didn't really think anything of it as I went across to the 15 guys up the road. Well, I got an earful by my friend who had decided to try to chop me the lap earlier. huh, guess he forgot that he came over on me and got a wee bit freaked out. that's bike racin'.

Anyway, the first 10-15 minutes I was pretty active, which is just about when the winning move went up the road and I basically chickened out trying to go across a twenty-twenty five second gap. Kind of sucks doing the lone wolf thing out there with no teammates - I just couldn't really bring myself to taking any pulls that really would do nothing for my chances of winning - plus, I was a little tapped after those opening few minutes and needed to recover.

So, I sat in and went hard at the end - lost a few positions on the last lap in turn 1 as I wound up on the outside and nearly got put into the curb. Followed Allen R. after that and hit the last corner in about 6th or 7th wheel in the field (there were 7 guys up the road?) and gave it a go before sitting up 25 meters in front of the line and coasting in for a whoppin' fifth spot in the field sprint.

Well, at least I didn't have to deal with any creative officiating this time around! :-)

Here's the SRM screenshot from the race (it was pretty hot - note the high HR in the finale - don't think I've seen 190+bpm in quite some time!):