Race Week..

Well all those hours on the trainer over the months of December and January are about to be put to the test. As I mentioned last week our first race is at NC State this weekend, and I am feeling a wide range of emotions both excited and nervous. I have never ridden in a road race before so I have really no idea what to expect. Sure I have watched countless hours of coverage on TV of the Tour de France but I expect that D class at a collegiate race will be much different. I expect it to be wild and crazy with way to much attacking and crashing. I expect many little groups to form rather than on large peloton and I expect for me to just try and hold on to one of these said groups as long as I can.

I mentioned a few months back that our team had received a sponsorship from Genuine Innovations (#1 in CO2 inflators) and after months of emails we finally got some merchandise this week just in time for the race.

It goes without saying that it was like Christmas in my apartment when the box arrived. We got a couple floor pumps, some inflators, some stickers and enough 16g CO2 canisters we figure we will just pop a couple of them off on the podium to celebrate.

Since we had some new tools on hand I decided it was time to put the race tires on the race wheels in preparation for the weekend. To this point I had been riding the older tires on the race wheels to make sure the wheels were going to hold spoke tension and stay true and after about 100 miles they look perfect still. I took the tires off the race wheels and put them back on the stock rims then proceeded to install the new tubes and tires.

They look pretty nice if I do say so myself. They were a bit of a pain to put on being so thin and lightweight but that just part of it. I did take them on a little 20 mile shakedown ride today to make sure they were solid and they held up. I will say that they roll smooth and fast on smooth pavement but sitting at 150 PSI when you get on rough roads you can really feel the increase in vibration. I haven’t got another cassette yet though which makes things kinda difficult but Im just waiting on the right deal.

I also cut about 6 inches off my seat post as well which is something I have been meaning to do for a while. After a couple hours work switching things out my bike now sits at 18.2 pounds. Its not quite where I though it would be but just another 100 grams and I can have it down into the 17 pound range which is pretty respectable for an older CAAD 8. IM thinking this will happen with a new compact crank before some of my endurance races in the mountains this summer.

We had a group ride Monday which got cut a little short due to rain. We got about 12 miles out from school when it started pouring. One of the girls on our team had never ridden in a tight pace line before so we took the time to get her use to that before the race on Saturday. All in all Iv been trying to take it easy this week without getting cold. For me It seems like there is a fine balance between going into a race with fresh legs and going in with cold legs. Cold legs come from taking a week off before a race, whereas fresh legs I find come from a pretty hard ride early in the week and then a light spin on Thursday to clear the legs out and then rest on Friday.

As a side note It seems like sometimes I take this way to serious and then other times not serious enough.

Marshall and I did take a little break on Tuesday to go play 36 holes of disc golf though. It was my first time and I really enjoyed it not only for the nice little walk through the woods throwing Frisbees but because I found another thing on this earth that Im better at than Marshall Parker Conrad.

Race Report next week…