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BnB Spaghetti Dinner Success and Wake Forest racing stories!

I"m still working on getting pictures into here, so bear with me haha.

So today Catherine and I hosted a spaghetti dinner to raise money for our bike and build trips, and it was  a GREAT success! We raised $418, and with Kroger's help only spent $40 on food, so that means $378 are going to help build affordable housing! Judging by the amount of money and number of plates we went through, about 80 people came out, which was awesome!!

WF Prologue and Road Race

Nick did a cool video review of the weekend:

[vimeo 9681455]

The races on Saturday were staged from a winery, which was pretty sweet, except for the beware of pesticide signs we parked next to on the vines.

The prologue was painful, I got to rock my new aero helmet and Reid let me borrow his aero wheels, so I was for sure feeling fast. I didn't actually get the result until Sunday, but ended up 14th in the C's with a time of 7:05.  Using Reid's wheels, I didn't actually know how fast I was going, but using that time and the distance of the race puts me at 19.74mph, which I'm pretty happy with considering that the whole course was mostly uphill!

The road race was good also, the weather was BEAUTIFUL which makes any race fun.  Brett and I started at the very back of the pack, which was really pretty terrible, and in the process of getting a better position I had to lock my rear wheel probably 3 times, because of all the yoyo-ing the back of the pack was doing.  Eventually we made up front, with myself taking some sketchy outside lines on corners across the yellow to pass, but once I was up there things smoothed out.  There were some hard accelerations and some minor attacks, which split up the field real good, and so by the time we were on lap 3/3, there were only about 25 of us left, and I was the only Tech rider.  I was feeling strong the whole race, which was pretty sweet because I was just chillin talkin to people, and actually met some guys.  This dude from Marshall, who I presume is the only member of their cycling team, had taken a plain white jersey and hand-drawn the marshall logo and name on the back haha, talked to him for awhile.  Then about halfway through that last lap, we actually started some pacelining, and I manned up and took a hard pull, and when I moved to the left...sure enough no one else pulled through. So I sat there, stopped pedaling hard (although never stopping pedaling) and as soon as I relaxed the speed, I heard a really nasty wreck happen in the middle of the field.  My fault? Maybe...but who knows what happened.  If it was because of the decelleration, it shoulda been the fault of whoever wasn't pulling through really.  And so I didn't want to just sit on the front, so I shifted down and few and sprinted out to the right....and then it was just me! But I'm pretty sure the field knew as well as I did that I had no intentions of really attacking haha, because there was no reaction in the form of chasing me haha. Maybe I could've rode away with it...but 5mi is a really long time to ride by yourself at the end of a race. So I got back in, and as the end of the race approached I moved into about third wheel on the left side of the race, hoping to be able to sprint out left at 200m.  But, when the road opened, the guy in front of me had the same idea, the problem being that he didn't sprint fast enough! So I was kinda stuck, kinda too tired to sprint hard anyway, and rode across in 8th.

Sunday Criterium

The highlights of Sunday include: finishing 5th in the crit, laying the parking lot IN A TSHIRT getting a sunburn eating ice cream out of a half gallon container...and well that's pretty much the best.  The crit, like the other races this weekend, was pretty awesome and I think it may have been because I'm strong enough this year to do more than just hang on the field...I can move around and use some strategy!

Less than two weeks of class remain till spring break, gonna make it till then!!