Banananananas

A 21hr week capped off with BB#2, a race series I haven't done since 2007. 6 laps around Hagg lake, a pretty long drive from Eugene to Forest Grove.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, since it was due to way fun times) I'd also had a week of late nights and a general lack of sleep, although riding and recovering was really not a problem, when the 5am alarm sounded and I went to pick up Graham for the drive up, I immediately wondered why this whole thing sounded like such a good idea earlier in the week.

Feeling good, I rode aggressively in the first four of six laps, which merely resulted in my missing the 5 man break of the day that actually stuck. There were some times when I got off with the right people and thought it would go the distance, but no, that failed to happen. Someday the lesson will be learned: don't play too hard while everyone else is fresh also, and pick the moves that have strong guys who haven't also been attacking all day.

Starting the last lap, on the way up the 200m finishing hill, I kicked it a bit and got a gap, taking only Steven from Kirkland with me. We pushed it hard and barely managed to snap the elastic after 5k, when we noticed a group of 5 coming up to us. Steven and I backed off on the climb up the dam and then we had company, and we started to hit it. With maybe 7-8k to go we started to see the pack behind us again and it was a bit of a battle to keep the pace high. I rolled through hard every time we slowed down, worried about being caught and spat out the back. At 2k to go Steven and I rolled away from the others and we went to the line, where I took "best of the rest". The remainder of the hail-mary 2nd breakaway got swarmed on the line.

After a longish break for lunch I did another 2 laps backwards to watch Graham finish. Since I didn't get photos of anything interesting all day, here's the cat 5 men's finish video:



shot in high-res but put into low quality for the web - changed formats a little bit things may be funky.