Tour de White Rock wrap up

So results:

Tasha

Hill climb, 2nd

Crit, 7th

Road Race, 7th

Overal 3rd

Derrick

Hill Climb,12th

Crit 16th

Road Race 8th

Man, I'm not even sure where to start, what an adventure! We took the bus from Vancouver to White Rock. Yah baby, we put our bikes on the front of the city bus and carried a cooler bag, back pacs and two wheel bags to Beautiful White Rock BC.

JIM Tsilamous from RWR hooked us up with Friends of his, Jason and Carrie Fluckiger of White Rock for host housing. Jason and Carrie and dog Zola proved to be extremely generous in opening their home to us and made our stay one of the most enjoyable experiences of all our travels to date. The house was nestled on the hill climb course and overlooked the Semiahmoo bay and provied a spectacular view of the Bay, beach and mountains in Washington. It's one of the places that makes you say, this is as good as it gets. Not only was the location outstanding, but Carrie and Jason made us feel at home and we got to talk shop about all things from cycling to health care and all things in between.

I'll let Tasha write a little something about the Hill climb and such since she really pulled it together this weekend, considering she did not have any teammates, and came 3rd in the GC, pretty impressive.

The Road race

134 km of up and down in White Rock. The men did an 9 km circuit 11times and then 5 finishing circuits of 3.something km's. I think, I could be wrong but you get the picture. So we still had a pretty big field and if you 've been following, you know Chris Horner was there, Health Net, Jittery Joes,Bissel,BMC and the "S" team of course.

So plan for me, myself and I was pretty simple. Frst me had had to cover early moves including anything with Pinner,Shriver, Horner.

Myself had to stay out of the wind, move up on downhills, climb within reason and make sure not to get caught on the back side of any splits or get stuck closing gaps.

I had to dig deep at the crunch time and really go for it when the real racing started.

So I have to say I knew it was coming I saw Horner on the front and I knew,but I was just a bit too far back so didn't make the move. But I managed to stay calm and it sort of came together when Health Net was dring it to get O'Bee across. Anyways I didn't quite make the winning move, so started going in attack mode, Symmetrics countered and then I chased around for the last few finishing laps coming about 5-10 seconds from closing to the chase. I finished 8th after a pretty hard chase but have to say that I was trying to podium, but I would have needed a mate to cover the early stuff and all the guys had a squad except for Horner ,but come on, the guy was 15th last year at the Tour de France, he's just at another level.

So overall, I have to say that the racing here at Superweek is great, don't come though if you don't like crits because you'll be wasting your time. But if you like hard NRC level crits, racing at the level it's great.

DSJ