Monday, August 22, 2005

Columbus Part 2

I did not mention that Columbus has a leaders jersey this year. Shannon had the chance to ride in yellow for the womens p1/2/3 road race. The only draw back was all they had was large so she had to pin the jersey so that it did not flap all over the place in the wind.
Okay, well here comes the part of the race where I walk into the door. The individual TT was about 3.5 to 4 hours after the finish of the road race. Seeing as I did not get much sleep the night before I tried to get some in between the road race and TT. Due to the high humidity and sheer heat we all did the bulk of our warmup in the hotel room. This helped cut down on the fluid loss. After warming up we rode over to the start and did our thing. I took off feeling good and kept my 30 sec. man in sight the whole time then I felt the roughness of the road with about 3 miles to go. Then I looked down and sure enough my tire was going flat. Watching my speed I noticed that it was going down, while my percieved exertion was going up. So I kept going but after a mile of flat, my 30 sec man was further down the road than before. I ended up losing time to the second place guy in GC, which moved me to 2nd in GC.
Sunday morning, the crit. well, I got alot more sleep for this race and I was happy. My legs felt good and I had some of my oatmeal (glue as nathan calls it) which keeps me from getting hungry. The race started off good. I just stayed up in the front 5 the whole race which kept the accelerations and decelerations to a minimum. Nathan helped out when a situation arose, where the guy in 3rd (GC) got down the road and I was blocked out of the attack so could not react. Nate helped to real the guys closer to the pack. I was feeling good all the way to the end, Carlos countered on of my last attacks and I just could not get up to him. Keeping me in 2nd overall. I have to thank those of you who were there cheering us on during the race. This definately helps.
O yea, Shannon was able to pull the "W" for the womens crit.
Hopefully there wil be some pictures that can be posted from the race.

Matt "I cant sleep" Seagrave

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