Cone Azalia Race Report

Well, Cone proved frustrating for yet another year. The start of the race seemed pretty normal - a few attacks here anld there with nothing really sticking. We got through the first dirt section without incident but I flatted on the second dirt section. Since a bunch of other riders had already flatted, I had to ride backward to the follow vehicle to get a wheel. Luckily I got the last available rear wheel in the follow car. Unfortunately by the time I had changed wheels, the pack was three minutes up the road and moving fast.

I started riding again to find my teammate Tim Saari had flatted his front tire. He had just finished switching wheels so I sat up while he re-mounted. We caught another rider and the three of us worked together. For some reason, the other rider either had a flat or got dropped because he was way far back all of a sudden.

Tim and I switched pulls for a while, trying to keep it steady, but still baking ourselves in the wind. After around 20 or 30 miles we sighted the pack about 1-2 minutes up the road (the landscape is wide open so we could see them after a turn). We were pretty happy to finally be getting close to the pack, but of course bad luck had to strike again. When we were about 500 feet from a railroad crossing, the lights started flashing and the gates went down. We had to wait for a long-ass train to go through before starting again. The race seemed hopeless.

Tim and I continued to work together for more miles, picking up and dropping riders along the way. With about two laps to go, we finally sighted a group of 1-2's not too far up the road. The group consisted of Ray Dybowski, John Card (I think), and a few other riders - around six in total. We finally caught them, but they weren't riding very fast. We sat in with them for two laps and listened to them complain. With about three miles to go I had enough so I pulled through hard to get the pace going a little. Nobody followed me and I soon found myself about 20 feet off the front. I figured I would just go with it since Tim and I were the only ones doing work in the group anyway. Tim would be able to sit up and let others pretend to do work, and I would be able to get up the road.

Well, it worked, and I successfully soloed away from the small group to roll in for 14th place. Unfortunately, luck once again failed to be on my side - since the number of total participants was 150, 25 fewer than the 175 needed to guarantee a purse, the promoter only paid out to the top 12 in the 1-2's.

Oh well. I guess bad luck is expected at Cone. Hopefully this spurt of bad luck means I'll have good luck at Collegiate Nationals in Fort Collins, CO.