I, along with 250 or so other racers were watching the weather all week in hopes of seeing sun, or at least dry conditions for the Oregon State TTT championships. Leading up to the race things seemed to be looking good for today. As of Saturday night they had a 10% chance of showers during the day...but mostly cloudy conditions.
Well....so much for the weatherman being right :(
The women and age categories were greeted to a downpour at the start of their race early in the morning. Driving down to Tangent, OR I passed through shower after shower arriving to roads that were a little wet but drying out fairly quickly.
Before I started warming up things looked really good. The roads were dry and there didn't appear to be any big rain clouds heading our way...I guess it's a good thing I'm not a weatherman since 10 minutes before I jumped on my trainer it started to rain buckets. It continued raining through my warm up, but started to taper off near the end. Looking at the rain area it appeared to have only hit the front 1/4 or so of the course and now that it passed may allow for good racing conditions on most of the course.
Lining up for the start of the race was a little, shall I say, exciting. One of my teammates waited until the last minute to show up....literally. With 1:15 to go before starting he finally rolled up ready to race.
Once we started, we all got clipped in and were off...or at least so we thought. The guy that was late didn't get clipped in and he was the last guy in the rotation, so nobody thought to look back for him. Well...we were a good 1/4 mile down the road before he was clipped in and rolling...so he sprinted to catch up to us latching on just before the first turn.
From there we headed up the only small climb on the course (I'm talking small...30 feet of climbing maybe) and were off. No teams passed us while in the starting box and we were the first CAT 3 team out so the closest team to us had a 3 minute head start and they were one of our CAT 4/5 teams. So we didn't have anybody to chase for a while. Regardless we settled into some really good pulls and a nice pace.
Coming around the 3rd main corner on the course the first "Shower" of the day hit us. It was a complete downpour including high winds and pea sized hail. Needless to say when you are moving at 25 mph - 26 mph and the wind is blowing pea sized hail and big rain drops into your face at 15 mph or so...it hurts. I found if I looked down a little most of the hail would hit my helmet and not my face which helped but at the same time put more wheel spray in my face from the riders in front of me.
2 miles or so of this and we had worked our way out of it and onto some semi-dry roads. We were able to ramp up the pace and get in some great work during this section.
Coming into the second lap midway down the back stretch we ran into the "Shower" again...more wind, rain and hail to deal with...Ugghh.
Continuing on with the race we worked our way out of the "Shower" and kept on our way.
The wind was constantly changing direction which made setting up a consistent echelon difficult. We ended up having the lead rider take the center of the lane which allowed the following riders to pick a side that shielded them best from the wind, which worked well for the rest of the race.
As we entered our 3rd lap we ran into some of the Senior Mens teams coming up on one just after they started. Already having completed two laps we gave them a bit of room to get moving figuring they would soon be going faster than us...however, that wasn't the case so we passed them. Shortly thereafter a team goes by us, which we think is the team we just passed...however, later we figure out it was a different team all together from the Senior Mens class. That confused us there for a while.
During this confusion we lost one of our teammates who blew up...and when I say "Blew Up" I mean "Blew Chunks" as he had some digestion issues or something. All I knew during the race is we were nearing turn #2 and I look back and he's nowhere to be seen...se we were down to three racers (which is what we needed to finish) and were hoping for no mechanicals.
With three racers you don't get as much rest between pulls, which tires you out quicker, but we made the best of the situation given we were all pretty equally matched when it came to our TT abilities.
Coming into the final lap we were greeted with a stiff headwind on the way down the back stretch and could only muster up speeds in the 23 mph - 24 mph range. I was very thankful to see turn #2 because that meant a minute or two with a cross wind then a good tail wind to the finish. As we made it through turn #3 we were able to pick the pace up into the 33 mph - 34 mph range all the way home.
In the end, we crossed the line with a time of 1:00:21 over a 27.3 mile course in horrendous conditions. This was good enough for 1st place in the CAT 3 mens field and should have us in the top 5 or 6 fastest times on the day. So I have been part of 3 TTT State Championships in the past three years and our CAT 3 team has brought home the title the past three years (I have been a part of the past two).
So goal #1 on the season has been achieved :)
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