Last Week (7/6-7/13) in Review

Last week's action started with Westlake World's being cancelled due to the stormy weather. I still did a 1.5 hour training session on my trainer. I struggle to stay on the trainer that long. Good thing the Tour De France is on my DVR.

Thursday saw the 1st race of The Chapel Series in Green. Only Jason Rapp and myself were there to represent Team SBR. This made our strategy easy, stay in the front and stay close to one another. With Jason giving me tips and advice as we warmed up, the start rapidly approached. (Thanks Jason!) Now as the rest of my teammates know, I need a warm-up. I struggle with the clip-in and hammer starts that some of these crits and road races start with. There was a great turnout of B Group riders and Stark Velo had about 7-10 riders taking the start. With that in mind, Jason placed us in the front row and at the start, we were in the top 7 riders as we rounded the first turn.

As I was waiting for the pace to rapidly increase on this technical course, it never did. Jason and I stayed near the front the whole 30 minutes and once the 5 laps started counting down the pace finally increased. Now I was sitting about 3rd or 4th wheel going into the bell lap. Jason was behind me and our plan was for me to try and lead him out going into the last couple turns. As we hammered down the back stretch, I still sat 3rd wheel behind two riders without teammates. As we approached the end of the backstretch, Jason yelled "Watch the Stark guys!" With that, I looked over my left shoulder and saw a Stark Velo guy attacking. As I ramped up my speed to jump with him, I noticed Jason firmly attached to his wheel. I jumped on Jason's wheel going into the final turns as well as a young rider, Drew. The four of us hammered around the last turns headed in the finishing straight. Jason on Drew's wheel and myself right behind Jason and The Stark Velo guy. As the sprint progressed, Jason secured 2nd behind Drew and I settled for 4th.

With 1 race down out of the 3 in the series, Team SBR is sitting in 2nd and 4th in points. I hope we can have just as good, if not better results to move Jason and myself up a spot or two.