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Day 1-BMW Omnium (Chattanooga)

The long course was a tough, tough course. In the Masters 30+ race, a break of about 6-7 rolled off the front in the first 10 miles… somewhere in there part of it came back… I was near the front on the transition from first pitches. Crossing I-24 the first time, I was in a group of 4 off the front 5-10 seconds. We were pulled back on the minor climb of Ladd Mtn…. I slid back as we came over Ladd and was near the back as dropped down the other side. On Sand Mtn, i was able to move up near the front in early part of the climb, but couldn’t stay with the main group as the road continued upward. So the rest of my race was all about chase groups… we collected to about 8 or so starting on US41. Up the stair step and across the valley road, we got down to 5. On the final climb, all 4 ended up climbing better that me. I ended up 24th overall (of 38 finishers). 11th 30+ racer (TBRA) and got 3 omnium points (13th ominium rider).

For context, the race was 59.3 miles and featured 4715′ ascent / 3652′ descent. I averaged 19.0 mph and climbed Raccoon Mtn in 22 minutes (which is 3 minutes worse than I did last year in the short course as a Cat 4 last year). I was in pretty bad shape going up Raccoon Mtn!

As for the TT, I did a lot better than my 9:30 last year and rolled a time of 8:55 (26.3 mph). That was good enough for 13th place in M30+. The course is a short 3.9 miles that is actually mostly downhill. The uphill section (about 0.5 mile @ 6%) is a bit rough after this morning, but at least it is followed by nice high speed downhill.

TT: 3.9 miles, 144′ ascent / 312′ descent.

Tomorrow, I need to get some omnium points to get into the money (top 10) for M30+. I think I am right at 9th-10th right now.

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Andrea continues her march towards winning the TBAR jersey. With her RR result today (6th) and her TT win today, she moved to within 1 point of 1st place. The TBAR system is best of 5 RR’s, 5 TT’s, and 6 crits–this is a pretty good system in that it does not reward someone who just races everywhere and helps to reduce the east Tennessee bias of TBRA to some degree in that us West Tennessee riders can skip races up in the Tri-Cities and still be competitive in the series. (Or also in Andrea’s case, skip TBRA races to do big races out of district.)