Blacksburg Weekend

As far as bike racing is concerned, this weekend was a disaster. The weekend started off on friday with my brother and I getting up at 6:30 in the morning to leave home from Michigan. The crit in Roanoke started at 6:15 pm. I drove for the first 5 hours of the trip, then stopped to refuel. My brother Sam then took over for a little while. I told him to just drive down the highway that we were on until we got to West Virginia. I then proceed to fall asleep in the passanger seat of the car.

One hour later I wake up and we are on the wrong highway by Pittsburg which is COMPLETELY out of the way of where we were going. After calling for directions and getting back on the road, I took over the driving and sped all the way down 76 to try and make up for lost time. I knew it was going to be close, so we made one quick stop for lunch to go, then back on the road again. We got stopped by an accident which put us back another half hour. After awhile I realized we weren't going to make it (aka when the clock in my car read 6:15) and I slowed down. I arrived a half hour late to watch the end of the race, thoroughly dissapointed for missing it. I would like to note, though, that it was not my brother's fault for driving in the wrong direction. I never told him what highway he needed to stay on, and right after I put my head back was the junction of 80/77 and he simply guessed the wrong way. He even woke me up to ask me if we were supposed to be going east. We were supposed to be going south but I assumed it was just a turn on the road that wer were supposed to be on without even looking up. My bad.

Day two of ID3 (Independence day), was the uphill TT. I gladly skipped that to move out of my apartment. I should have took a picture of the room that I stored all my stuff into, but I forgot. Let's just say I made good use of the space.

Day three of ID3 was a crit in Blacksburg. The crit was basically Rockford, for all my Michigan readers. It had a decent sized hill every lap, with a some what technical decent for which to recover. "Bang" the gun went off and by the end of the first lap I was off the front with Andrew Olson and one other rider for a lap or two before getting caught by the field. It was sometime in the next few laps that John Hamlim of Time pro cycling team made his move on the outside up the climb. We chased hard for the next 10 laps, and I was barely hanging on. After about 5 laps of going all out on the hill, I found that I couldn't recover fast enough. The pace didn't let up, and I soon found myself off the back on the climb and out of the race. I am not sure why I did not feel good, but whatever did happen resulted in the biggest dissapointment of the year. I did not want to race bikes the half hour or so after the race. That dissapointment, however, turned into a training drive where I am determined to become a better cyclist and to stick to my training schedule for the rest of the summer. John Hamlin ended up lapping the field. Congrats to Ben King and Owen Nielson for getting 2nd and 3rd respectively.

Sorry there were no pictures today, I will try harder to remember to bring my camera in the future.

Until next time,

JZ