View Single Post
Old 03-04-20, 11:30 AM
  #23  
TMonk
Not actually Tmonk
 
TMonk's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 13,928

Bikes: road, track, mtb

Mentioned: 140 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 2502 Post(s)
Liked 2,946 Times in 1,567 Posts
Haven't been as active with posting, super busy at work and with all of the wedding planning! It's in 2 months. But I have been racing!

VoS cat 2 was fun, minus being 2 minutes late to the start of my TT... (D'oh!). My ride was still only 32' (by my watch) and would have been 22/52... Yeah there's some room for improvement there. Due to my botched start I was lacking motivation on the return leg when it really mattered, so that was worth some time, but still I'm humbled to be mid-pack after all the TT training I've done. Still though, this is a specialist's race and I'm excited to do more ITT in the future and continue to improve on my position, power and pacing tactics. I've spoken with a coach at the velodrome down here who offered to do a complimentary TT fitting for me, which should help establish a baseline I can tinker off of instead of just winging-it, which is what I have done up until now.

RR and crit were fun, no results personally but as a team we got 2nd and 1st in them, respectively. Our racer is so talented that I doubt my help mattered, but I went on strong moves late in each race to help string things out and keep him safe and slotted up front. In the crit I grabbed a $100 prime in the lap cards and stayed OTF until the bell lap with another rider which was cool. We still had 1 leadout man for our talented rider left so they finished that one off nicely.

Outside of that it's been a couple crits just getting bossed around by Legion of Los Angeles. This is def. a new level of speed for me and while I'm fit and feel just fine in the field, when I pop out into the wind I'm like "OK this is actually fast" and moving up is hard. Still I've been able to attack a couple times in the races but unless I have other riders I can hardly even last a lap in front of them doing their thing without any acceleration from them. Kind of like how most moves are really against them... Even a concerted effort of a few riders won't last against an 8-man TTT till the sprint finish. It's been like a group ride behind their team basically. If Cory or Justin aren't in a move up front in a SoCal crit, and they have a full squad, a break just won't stick, period. These guys are basically pros and need a bigger pond to swim in! Still, it should be fun in TdM or other bigger races to have some real pro teams give them a run for their money.

Oh and they can be super aggressive, like physically pushing anyone who ends up near the front/in their train, so you kind of have to launch from like 10 riders back which is more than I'd prefer. It's like cool guys, I get it that you're all pro and aggro and stuff, but some of us have day jobs...

As for me I'm looking forward to TTT states and weekly track racing once that starts. I still need to race a few more times to get my reimbursement, clothing and other benefits, but not super interested in getting beat by Legion again. Wish there was more Cat 2 only racing...

Regardless of the predicatable finisih in these SoCal crits I'm still having fun training and racing and that's what counts!
__________________
"Your beauty is an aeroplane;
so high, my heart cannot bear the strain." -A.C. Jobim, Triste

Last edited by TMonk; 03-04-20 at 11:33 AM.
TMonk is offline  
Likes For TMonk: