Snow day. It snowed way more than I was expecting on Saturday, about 5" by the time we woke up. Saturday was ultra stressful and I was a little run down from the holiday week. I started my openers indoors and bailed because I wasn't feeling it. It was supposed to shift to rain later in the day and I was assuming most of it would melt and it would be a mud fest, but instead woke to a crusty 3" on Sunday morning. Weather was pretty chilly with a 17* wind chill but naturally I was pretty stoked for some fun conditions.
I walked a bit of the course and found it to be pretty straightforward so opted to get a good warm up in on the rollers and a quick lap before lining up. It was going to be slow and pretty straight and there wouldn't be any real lines from the small group of die-hards warming up until a few laps in. I considered trying to run really low pressure, as it was 100% snow covered, but stuck with the usual 24/24.5 I've been running all season, which turned out to work really well.
I was happy to see Anthony and another 40+ guy in attendance I didn't know, among the other regulars. There were about 5 40+ and 4 SS that started in front of us. Dr. Mark took the hole shot and I waited a bit before making a move around him and then burned a lot of matches moving up off the line. It was brutal. I think I caught Anthony and the other guy on the second lap and shortly after that had my only real mistake of the race and went down, but didn't lose much time.
I built a decent lead on the Purdue guy and Anthony with 3 lap cards to go and when I came though the next time it had been adjusted up. It felt really hard and I had no idea how long into the race we were but had started to nail some of the lines and was finding it was pretty easy if you didn't deviate, but my legs felt torched. I had almost a half a lap (short laps) lead by the time I finished, which was about 31 mins. I couldn't believe it was that short, definitely didn't feel like it. Overall really happy with the way I raced and getting my shit together this week so I feel a little better next weekend at States. The weather this week should make things interesting!
