5/21/06
Highest CP60 of the year!
93°F; Ergomo Pro/Spin

Yesterday I raced the Coal Miner's Classic in Louisville, CO. This is always one of the top 3 hardest races on the Colorado calendar and yesterday was certainly no exception. The course is about one mile long with the finish straight being a quarter mile long at a 6% grade. This is the kind of hill that zaps your legs because it isn't quite a small chain ring climb and about 30 minutes into it you wish you could bale out and watch from the sidelines. I was wishing I could pull out within the first three laps this year however. It was 90 degrees and we set a hightemperaturee record for the day. Then on the 2nd lap Greg Henderson (Health Net world track champion) attacked and I had a farely simple decision to make..Do I let him roll away and win or do I at least go with him and give a good fight to try and stay with him? Well I'm never one to give in so of course I followed his wheel and one other went with me.

The outcome was worse that I could ever have imagined. Greg was so strong we couldn't even pull through. When I did come through it was for about ten seconds and our speed would drop dramatically. On the climb I sat on hsi wheel at 20 watts and he wa staking it easy on me. I sat on him for the better part of 10 laps until he finally just rode away from us. At that point we had a 25 second advanatge on the field and I was hoping I could get caught by the group, take a brief rest and then go to the front to help my Vitamin Cottage teammates chase Greg down.

Well what ended up happening of course was a flurry of attacks started after I was reeled in and my teammates did an excellent job of stacking the odds in our favor to hopefully get 2nd place. Jon tarkington, Chuck Coyle and Christian McCarthy made the chase groups and I was left in the back sprinting for 10th place. By this time Greg had build up a 50 second lead as his "dead weight" was gone and he was free to go as fast as he wanted.

That is the worste I have been dropped in about 2 years, but at least it was to a super fast guy (although on injured reserve after breaking his hip a few months ago :( . This was my highest CP60 of the year at 295avg watts and 330 normalized power. Hopefully that amount of suffering only made me a stronger rider though.

Thanks again to my teammate Jon Tarkington for saving the day at getting 2nd place yesterday.