Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Bahamas

Tour of the Bahamas went well. With Floyd Landis showing up, the Garmin devo team bringing 6 riders, and some super strong Florida-based riders, the race was much tougher than I was expecting.

Saturday morning was a 42 mile circuit race on a 6 mile lap. A move went pretty early with some garmin development guys and a rider from one of the stronger florida teams. When another group started to go up the road I bridged across to them, then we road across to the riders in front to make a group of 11. That group eventually split, with me making the leading group of 6. I had good legs but Garmin had 3 guys in there so it was never gonna end but one way. They worked me over and got 2 guys up the road. Their third guy got to sit on the last few miles and beat me by half a wheel in the sprint, but I was reasonably happy with 4th.

Riding to the 3 mile tt later in the day I discovered one of the bearings in my pedals was broken and the pedal was frozen badly enough I could barely turn it with my hand. I looked for a quick fix but with so little time I had to race on the damaged pedal. Despite all the extra resistance I put down a good ride and placed 4th again in the TT, just a few seconds out of 2nd but 8 or 9 back from Landis. Would have been nice to know how much faster I could have gone with a pedal that worked. The tt put me in 3rd overall going into the road race.

Sunday was a hard, windy 90 mile road race. All day we were going hard in crosswinds or sprinting to cover attacks. Unfortunately one of my teammates was hurting pretty bad and the other helped out but missed the split a little over halfway through. So this led to me taking it on the head pretty good trying to cover attacks form a couple different teams. I handled it ok but could tell I was cracking towards the finish. I attacked at one point trying to get enough time to get 2nd on GC, but ended up getting caught, counterattacked, and dropped. Lost a couple spots on GC at the end but ended up 5th or 6th I think. Losing a spot on the podium was pretty disappointing, but then I remembered I was in the Bahamas and got over it.

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