i meet up with b and wesson at 7a at the waffle house to carpool down to mobile, al which is about 1:30 min drive. we had a blast on the way down telling jokes and bullshit that you talk about before the race...all the extra excuse of why we didn't do good if we didn't do good...
legs felt a little tender in the morning on the way down but the body felt good. the scene was good when we got down there...lots of folks, a spacey walk for the kiddies, local folks at the beach, lots of disc golfers...
the warm up went well but super chill...rode the first starting section of the trail and tooled around the park a little, mostly just to get some blood flowing. the same line up of guys showed up at the race as did a few weeks ago at BBB so i new what i was up against. kuppersmith took the hole shot like i knew he would but unlike last race, i thought i would test the legs and just go...so i took the second position going into the woods, then it was tre and b.lee rounding out the top 4...out of that, i'm not sure. after the first mile, i knew the legs were going to be solid. kuppersmith and i got a small gap on tre but he was never far behind...and eventually bridged back up to us as we started ran into the cat 1 19-29 fellas. after we passed the main group of them kuppersmith laid down an attack, i followed with no problem...we gaped tre again and didn't see him again. we rode smooth thru the first lap. grabbed a new bottle(a little more on that later) took a shot of hammer gel as did he and we went back into the woods. after the firs section, i took the lead. we hammered out that lap and caught the 1st place cat 1 racer and dropped him. the rest of that lap and the majority of the last lap was just us riding hard. once we came to the end of the race, he put in a little attack but cramped...i didn't attack, i could/should have...cause once we eased of the pace for just a few seconds and came out of the woods to enter the finish area, he went again. i wasn't ready and could keep his wheel...he got me at the line by a bikes length....3rd was about 4:30 back.
i feel great about the race...i was coming off 2 weeks of a building phase in the training plan and didn't even plan on doing this race until the a day before. the legs felt good, the HR was steady but not too high, handling skills are coming back, and most importantly to me...the ability to keep the lap times the same...maybe only 1 min off from 1st thu 3rd laps.
pics to come...
