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Today was quite a day of racing.  Cara and I awoke at 8am, so that we could go outside and walk the less than 100m to where the Tour of China was scheduled to race past our apartment.  This was pretty cool and only the second time I have gotten to see a full blown UCI road race. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were able to get all of the cars and buses off of the roads for the race to go by. We were outside by 9am, but the race didn’t end up passing until 10:30. Watching a race like that certainly has to be more about hanging out with friends than it is about the race since it was all past in under 1 minute.

In the afternoon, we headed over to the Zhuhai airport to do a race for the amateurs. At work all week, my coworkers were asking me if I was racing in the UCI race, and I had to tell them, no, I am just doing a local amateur race that happens to be on the same day in the same city. It was nice for the race to be close to home, so I was able to spend time at home before heading over. Cara and I arrived around 1pm, more than early enough, despite my teammate insisting that the latest arrival acceptable was 11:30. We got signed in very quickly and I was able to watch the race before mine start before I got started with warming up.  After about 30 minutes of warming up it was time to sit in line and wait for the start of my race. We had to wait for almost 30 minutes before all the stragglers of the previous race finished and we were allowed onto the course to the start line.  Then it was another almost 30 minutes before we ever got to start. The plus side of all of this was I had a front line starting position. That almost never happens to me, and I was going to make the most of it.

The race started what I considered as 20 minutes late, but was actually 10 minutes early, starting at 3:20, and I took off like a rocket with 2 other guys. We sprinted off the starting line, but it certainly wasn’t to be as they didn’t want to work together and pull off anything special, so we sat up and were caught after one length of the race. The race was just laps on one road with U-turns and the 2 ends, so nothing interesting or special. It had a slight rise of maybe 10m in it, but that was the extent of all climbing in the race. We raced for 60 km and I was happy to see that we were going quite fast averageing around 45 kph. It felt good to race in a large pack at high speed again, since the other races I did this year were slow or small packs and I felt bad. Today I didn’t feel great, but I attacked and followed other attacks for the first 3 laps trying to get away in something, but it wasn’t to be. The attack and break that ended up staying away went on lap 3 right as I was pulled back. They took off and 7 guys finished in front of the field working very well together up until the end where they finished 1:40 up on the field. The rest of the race for me, was just cruising around the course at high speed moving up and back in the field trying to stay in the first 40% or so, to avoid stupidity. On the last lap, things sped up again and I was able to bring myself up to the top 5 coming into the final 500m.  We swung around the last U-turn 400m from the line and I was ready to go for the sprint, as everybody swung out and shoved me off the course into the cones. Luckily, I was able to swerve and miss the cones, but that blew any prospect of doing well in the field sprint. I heard a nasty crash behind me coming into that final U-turn as well, and luckily, my teammates that had been hanging out at the back managed to miss it and not go down.

We all finished safely, albeit with no results to show. It was a good time had by all and shortly after finishing, we were headed home. We arrived home by 6:30 and had a wonderful dinner prepared by Cara of Moussaka, a Greek lasagna that we fell in love with while in Greece. After a fun-filled day and full bellies we fell asleep content with our day.

 

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