Training week + Giro di Coppi

My brother Nick was in town this past week to hang out and ride a lot. And ride a lot we did. It was certainly a big step up in hours from what I've been putting in. The week totalled about 20 hours. Big days were the Tuesday Blackhawk-->MagicMo-->BlackMo mountain spectacular, followed up by the Alexandria-->Speedride century of fun. I felt a lot better than I thought I would after such a week, and was excited to head out to do a rather up and down road race course down in Maryland put on by a team we have both previously ridden for.

The day of racing was started off by Lisa, Nick's wife, trouncing the competition once again to claim her 12th victory of the year. Sandbagger. Nick and I went off a few hours later. I had 50 hilly miles ahead of me whereas Nick had about 75 I believe. I did my best to stay near the front, as I knew splits would occur on the climbs that abound throughout the course. The first lap I worked pretty hard, and was about 10-15th wheel through the uphill finish. The next lap I hung out and saved my energy as much as I could. During the third lap a few breaks started getting small gaps, and I noticed the Coppi guys (who's jersey I was wearing) weren't getting into all of them. So I went up there and the next one that split off without one of us on there I waited for someone else to jump and just rode their wheel up to the break, sucker. I'm not sure why he did it either because he had a guy up there. Anyway we all pulled through once, and then I found myself first into a relatively hard corner into a narrow uphill road. I looked back and our gap was pretty small, so I decided to see if I could get just one or two of the guys to come with me and attacked pretty hard through the corner. Noone came up, and I was alone up there with a gap I couldn't hold for the 20 or so miles left in the race, so I just rode up the climb steadily and reintegrated into the group. After that I recovered as best I could and stayed in the top quarter of the now relatively small field. Two guys jumped where I had the previous lap, and they ended up staying away. I was right there, but I was like... oh oh! not doing that again. Oh well. Came time for the uphill sprint and I had jack, so I just rode it in for what is a respectable 23rd, considering how many miles I put in this week.

Nick also put in a great ride to pull out a 12th in the Pro 1,2 race. Nice way to break in the new carbon race hoops. Didn't see much of the race, but it was splintered to all hell on the last lap. Two places out of the money... d'oh.

So now it's time to eat pasta and take it easy this week... Toona coming up, gotta score a point.