The P Course was run this evening. I had pretty low expectations going into the race (as opposed to every other B race, right?), and I pretty much expected to get dropped. And, I did. It happened pretty quickly, and a group of maybe ten or twelve riders quickly formed as the second group, and we stayed together, mostly, for the rest of the race. I spend a great deal of time sitting on back (Ben pointed out how difficult it is to sit on the rear of a group, and I told him I’ve made this into an art), though at some point early in the race I put in an effort to close a gap in the group. We managed to hold off the leaders ’til the finish line, which was fine with me.

The course itself was very fun, and I felt pretty safe once the groups were established. I saw two crashes in the hairpin out of the start/finish straight, but both were single riders misjudging the turn and going down. One went down in front of me, the pace was slow enough that I managed to get by without much issue, though chasing the group down again hurt a bit. The race, even our little group, was quite hard. Until our pace really dropped near the end, I was hurting. The acceleration out of the hairpin was always hard, and the pace was kept high through the sweeper. The turn into the finishing straight also had some serious accelerations, though I managed to work out a good shifting routine to keep the effort down a bit. I’m certainly looking forward for the next P course go ’round.

Posted on 20 May 2009