Clearance Rockland CLASSIC

Gotta love spring races, cool weather bad roads, lots of gravel. Glen put on a great race today, just South of Ottawa, the conditions were tough, the race was only 90 km, but it's not an easy 90km, let me tell you.

I probably made my day a little tougher than it had to be by performing a new sport I invented...it's called gravel bike skating. I invented this today...what you do is during a race, go hard, get your heart rate high...not max, but about 80%, then go through a gravel corner, take a bad line, change lines through the corner to avoid a pot hole...now here is the tricky part....as you are doing this unclip one foot from the pedal...the right, as you unclip it, skate it along the gravel a good rate of speed, then do a sort of cyclocross dismount while trying to keep the bike up right, smash one knee on the gravel, do not let go of the bike, hit the deck briefly, then do not loose any momentum and run and remount on to you r bike...ok maybe not such a good idea, but it will give you a little bit of a sore knee, some gravel in your butt and sheer the plastic off your cleats.

So that being said, things were gong pretty good, it was a hard race, the local guys include Two thirds of the Nationals podium from last year so...we try to rip each others legs off, pretty much.

We had a nice little break going and Aaron attack with about 20 km to go...we were a little slow to respond, I saw the gap growing to about 20 seconds and I was pretty concerned, as on gravel roads the draft isn't all it's cracked up to be, I told the guys if we had any hope to catch him we had to do it now, just as we went over the next hill, I flatted, so that was my race, I got a wheel a few minutes later, but it was over, I rode to the finish and called it a day.

Funny enough my knee didn't really hurt during the race, but it was pretty stiff after and after I looked at what I did to my cleat, pedal and shorts it all made sense.

I'm not really sure if we would have caught Aaron as he ended up putting 2.5 minutes in the next guys, but I was most surprised to see Casey Roth up in the front group with us. This guy has come a long way in a year, strong as an ox. He ended up finishing fourth on the day, just missing out on the podium, barely. So good on him.

It's a little ironic that I often have a little misfortune in early season Ottawa races, but that's racing. Training gets you prepared physically, but mentally it's just not the same thing.
The thing is the more stock you put into a race, the more disappointed you can become if you don't win. I forgot about that part...I mean have a bad day training, well it's not that bad, no one really knows or sees it, you get over it about 20 minutes after the workout.

Good thing about a blog is you get to jot it down, get it out and then it's over. That's why for every trophy on the shelf there are 6 bibs with would have should have could have's all over them. It's a 6:1 thing.

So my real excuse for not winning today.... I was hurried this morning and I had Tasha pin my numbers to a jersey I left in the car. This was bad as I always put pins in the same direction and put a certain number of pins according to size of the numbers...lesson learned.
DSJ