So as I predicted the crew had a good day today. Riders other than the duo..
Young Karl Hoppner laid some smack down to finish 3rd in his 1st US junior race! They start em young here, so that is a really good sign of things to come from this youngster from Ottawa. Tash and I saw Connor (The Condor) O'Brien and Karl sprinting their brains out last week at the PEAK centre in Kanata..just as we were getting into our sprint session. Good to see that the kids are working on their high end. I think this training comes from OZ (the Wizard Wild man) Bakker. Who incidentally put in another solid ride to round out the top ten today. Knowing Oz he's probably pretty happy with another good ride, picking up another UCI point and making some bling!
Steve Proulx said he "crashed a million times" and ended up in the top 20. Word on the street is he'll have a better day tomorrow.
So for us, a good day as well. Natasha must have brushed against Steve and got some of his crashilitis...cause my girl had more crashes than the Daytona 500. But she muscled her way back and scooped up a 4th place podium...1 second shy of third.
I had a solid ride, started off a little slow...we arrived to the course a little too late today and didn't really pre ride enough, had to rush the warm up and blah blah.
Never the less found my groove on the 2nd lap, was on the tail end of a group in about 17 th place or so, then started riding through people, found a group and rode as hard as I could on each uphill, flat and twist. It worked really well, ended up dropping some of the guys I was with. One guy was with me and he stepped on the gas out of a corner and busted his chain. Ironically I brought the bikes in to the shop this week and Steve (Cyclery mechanic extraordinaire) said the chains were finished and put on some new ones. Man when I saw this guys' chain break, I thought it was as ironic as a fly in my chardonnay. It sucks when things like that happen. We were going at it pretty hard, it would have been fun to duel to the end. Anyways I finished 12th which was pretty close to the objective today.
Got some air time and props from the announcer today...he said I was having a great ride. That was nice. I mean I don't do this to get famous or for recognition, but it sure is nice to get some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
So tomorrow will be hard, a little bit more technical, lots of running. That's ok. I've been running a lot lately and my legs feel great. I guess Ken's training is working. Tasha will go well if she gets the job done as I know she can..later.
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