Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Tuesday in PDX


This is what Portland bike racers do on Tuesdays: loops at PIR. It's sort of a Thursday Nighter / Greenhill Crit combo, only without any rollers and with more people. We averaged just over 26mph in the 1/2/3 field, which isn't all that fast even with the winds, when compared to Eugene races. It is far more fast/slow/fast/slow. HPC got our man in the 3-up break to take all the sprints and win the final, and I played the team card all night until Yann and I sat up before the last turn to let the sprinters take over. Good times.

The season has been a non-starter so far. Between getting sick 3x, going to Hawaii for 10 days with the wife, horribly crappy weather even for an Oregon winter, and working, I went from being on par with last year by late January to not riding and feeling like I just had an off season. The rebuild is going slowly - And since Oregonians don't do road races into the summer that means there's about 2 months of good stuff left before it all turns to crits and stage races. Doing PIR 2x a week and riding Skyline after work should do a decent job of getting the speed back - but the lack of fast group rides around here is a real downer.