Cherry Pie

I was in the office all this week so I should have had the opportunity to train all week. I was planning on taking Monday off as my legs were pretty sore from Saturdays race and Sundays hard ride up mt. Diablo. I took Monday off and started to prep my second bike for the upcoming race on Sunday. I started to stretch the tubular tires in order to have them ready to be glued onto the rims later. I spent Tuesday taking the old glue off the rims and then putting the first layer of glue on the tires and rims, during which I managed to stab myself with a screwdriver in the thumb.
Wednesday followed with another layer of glue and then I mounted and centered the tires onto the rims. Afterwards I pumped them up to 140 psi and left them for 24 hours to sit. Although it was late (8pm), I got dressed for the cold weather and went out for an hour ride.




Thursday was spent doing hill repeat intervals, in preparation for the race on Sunday. There is a small housing development a half mile from our apartment with short but very steep hills and I spent the better part of an hour climbing those hills. Friday I took the day off and then on Saturday I had a short but harder ride up mt. Diablo. Saturday was also the day that I discovered a problem with the second bike(the bike I was going to race). With my skills of deduction I realized that the problem was coming from the rear wheel and more specifically the rear hub/cassette. I rode the bike to the local bike shop and they told me not to ride that wheel and that I would have to have the hub serviced to fix the hub which wasn't spinning smoothly.




I scratched the plan of riding the second bike and prepped the first bike for the race. The cherry pie crit is in a business park in napa and the race goes around a 1 mile lap with a short hill up to the start finish line. Our race had 67 riders total, a large field to say the least and it was full gas from the start of our 40 minute race. I stayed in the front of the race for the first five laps to avoid any crashes; it is early in the season and everybody is nervous and crashes are more likely to happen. Each time up the climb was hurting and I wanted to reserve some energy for the end so I took the next few laps pretty easy on the climb and was swarmed and moved to the back of the field. With 3 laps to go I started to move up in the field but I only moved up about 10 places going into the last lap. I moved up a further 10 places going into the final time up the climb and waited to launch my final sprint. I found a good gap and with a final effort I moved up to 26th place by the finish. I was happy with the finish but know I need to work a little bit harder on my positioning in order to be closer to the front when the sprint will matter.
P.S. we found some food trucks near our work and one truck was making tacos with a twist. Fried eggs on tacos and a Mexican Pepsi. Picture below.



P.p.s. a lot of cyclist break there collarbones (clavicle for all of you medically inclined people) due to the way that most cyclist crash on their shoulders and it breaks relatively easy for such puny cyclists. A teammate of mine recently crashed and will need to have his broken collarbone put back together with a titanium rod. Picture of X-ray below.


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Location:Napa, CA