Cambio Stage Race - June 16 & 17

This past Sunday, June 17th, was the Kalaeloa RR. The only difference from last years race was that this year, a short time trial was added on Saturday, which made it a 2 day stage race.

Since I wasn't feeling all that "chipper" last week, I only decided to do the race on Friday - after getting taunted by my bicycle insider guy. Luckily now that I have a dedicated TT bike, all I had to do was change my wheels out. Instead of using my Spinergy rear wheel, I used the rear wheel that came with the bike, since there was going to be a 850 ft climb at the end of the TT and the Spinergy rear wheel is very flexy.

Stage 1 Map: http://www.hawaiicyclingcup.com/alohastate_stage1_tt.pdf

There was a lot of guessing by everyone whether to use a heavier TT bike or a lighter road bike. In my case, my TT bike is almost 3 pounds heavier than my road bike - but I decided to just use my TT bike since I only used it once so far.

Saturday morning brought wet roads for most of the TT and my bike ended up looking like a mess.

Since I decided to race my 4 pound overweight ar$e in the 1-2-3 field, instead of the 4-5 field, I would say that I did OK (27:40) in the TT as the first 13 or so minutes were fast and pretty flat, then I took another 14 and a 1/2 minutes on the Pupukea climb. Ended up placing 4th in the Master Men field about a 1-1/2 minutes behind the big hitters in the MM field who ended up all doing it in the 26 minute range.

Me motoring along from Haleiwa to the Pupukea Safeway store: http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/OrderPage.aspx?pi=0NKM0007000038&po=38&c=

Sundays road race was another tooth puller as I only decided to do it at 6:20am on Sunday morning. I mean, since I wasn't feeling it and all, a slug fest 50 miler with the 1-2-3 field was not something I was really looking forward too.

This years race was a waaaayyyy harder than last years!!! Now this is what bike racing is all about...really hard repeated jumps and very high speeds. I would say that bad positioning (and not enough conditioning) caused me to get popped on about the 13th lap.

It was a subtle attack that I didn't think was going to really pan out...so I reacted a little to slowly, and once I realized they weren't slowing down, I went balls to the walls for as long as I could to try to get on. I was just praying that I could keep my speed up until they slowed down...but this time, they didn't slow down :-(

Oh well...live and learn...

In the other big race, my friend Mark did really good and took 2nd overall in the MM4-5 field. Mark decided to use a pure road bike for Stage 1: http://www.photoreflect.com/pr3/OrderPage.aspx?pi=0NKM0007000012&po=12&c

Results to be posted on: http://cambiamento.wordpress.com/

My 16 pound race machine I used in the 15 lap, 50 mile, Stage 2 race.

Sent to: http://www.mycyclingpage.blogspot.com/