roadcx.net

This year the Tour de Louisiane started out with the road race in the morning. Last night I wasn’t feeling so great and only could eat part of our late dinner at Acme Oyster House. I ended up eating a PB&J bagel before I turned in and just hoped that I would feel better in the morning. This morning, the sleep helped, but I knew I was not quite 100%… but the road race started at 9am, so there was no time to complain.

Going into the 5 lap, 80 mile road race, I knew I needed to start off conservatively and see if I could get myself right during the race. This was all well and good, but the attacks started almost immediately off the starting line with a small split off of riders. That was pulled back and there was probably another one of those (or two) before a larger group moved off the front… and was never seen again. The break had representatives from several of the teams in the 40 man field so the chase was never really that serious. Fortunately, the amount of attacks were also few given my condition.

By the time we finished, the temperature was approaching 90F, but the humidity was pretty high making it feel worse. At the last minute, I opted for the 4th bottle. It was good because I drank all of it and part of a bottle that Andrea was able to hand-off on the last lap (after her race was done).

In the end, there was 4 or 5 riders that put serious time into the field (5-10 minutes?) and a few more between the leaders and the field. The sprint for 9th (or whatever place) was sort of half-hearted at first, but picked up when Brooks (Mercy) jumped early and got reactions from the front of the pack. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so nimble and had to bridge back up to the back of the group, bringing the field with me… I don’t even want to hazard a guess, but if I had to, I was probably about 15th in that sprint, maybe 25th overall? In any case, we all were “same time”. All of us were many, many minutes out of the race. With only a 3 mile TT and a criterium to go, the top 8 or 9 are pretty much set, the rest of us will battle for the remaining 6 paying spots (15 deep).

After the RR, Andrea and I drove back to Covington and started to track down closed restaurants (bad leads in the Garmin and in Google Maps) in downtown Covington… In the end, we drove back and ate at Silicy’s italian buffet near the hotel (think CiCi’s). By the time we got there, the concept of a buffet worked well, since we were both pretty hungry by then. What remains to be seen is how it will work for our short TT this evening…