Another big for me week of training, which is funny because that's only about 10 hours these days. It's tough to get the numbers I want when racing on Sunday, but I the racing itself is a huge part of the prep and fun, so fuck it. I got in a 3 hr easy ride in on Saturday and was tired, but not too bad. First one of those in a long time. It was great.
Little washed out on Sunday morning but the legs felt better than last week and I got a decent warm up in before pre-riding. Also, ate a couple Cliff blocks before the warm up and went with the 160 cal Enervit Gel pre race, which definitely helped. The course was huge, used up a lot of area at St Vinnies and was by far my favorite Bubba track that I can remember. Definitely a crossers course.
There were about 5 SS guys that started 15 seconds in front of us. Brandon was there again so I was motivated to chase him down this week. I got a good jump and was into the sand with a bike length or two. I rode it cleanly and there was more separation. I was really surprised I caught some of the SS guys before the downhill parallel to the paved uphill and was opening gaps on the 40 plus guys, but nothing major.
After the sand on the second lap I had 5-10 seconds on the 40+ and by the parking lot had caught and passed all the SS guys. I was free and said fuck it and went full throttle. On laps 3 and 4 there was an out of town guy from the 50 plus who had passed all the 40+/SS riders and was closing down the gap to me, maybe to 30 seconds or so. I thought he was in our race so I went hard. Aside from the first lap every lap was faster. I was able to open the gap on Paul, probably to around a minute and Dave was the first 40 plus rider behind him.
Really happy with this race. I had total focus and felt great. Am really looking forward to how racing feels without this training load. One more big week.
