This race had it all, wind, rain, hail, a gravel road and some pretty gnarley holes in the road along the way. If it wasn’t for the weather this race course would have been somewhat easy compared to others. The course was mostly flat with every few turns so you didn’t have that slowing and acceleration to deal with like a lot of road races.

The wind was the biggest factor at the race. WOW, I have never ridden a bike in wind conditions like this and did anything possible to hide from it.

It started to rain and hail for the first 15 min of the race and I thought that was it for me because I started to get wet and cold. Fortunately the rain stopped and I began to warm up.

You had to be careful on the backside of this course because the roads had some really bad pot holes in the middle of the road. I watched a couple of guys on the first lap nearly crash due to the pot holes.

The gravel road basically had two lanes to ride down, one lane on the far left side and one up the center. If you got out of either lane you had an 80% chance of running into problems (crashing, flatting).

After we came off the gravel road the second time the first attack took place. I got in the breakaway but could keep pace with it. I fell back with a couple of other guys and we waited for a group of 5 to catch us. Now in the second group (8 of us) we worked really hard to keep a sizable gap between us and the main peloton while keeping eye contact with the lead group of 5 to 7 riders.

As the race wore on a few riders from the lead group started to fall back to my group. One of the riders we picked up was Doug, was I happy to see him. On the fourth lap Doug I and guy from Mack racing attacked, we stayed away from our group for the whole fourth lap and got caught on the fifth lap because of the wind. Again the wind was BRUTAL! We worked with our small group of riders on the final lap just to survive.

I came in 14th place but will wait for the results to come out.

I enjoyed this race and will absolutely do it again!

Pat D.