I could tell this morning that I dug pretty deep in yesterday’s Stage 5 because I was feeling especially drained when I got out of bed. Although Sean and I working together during the circuits got us some time on some of the others and left me in 17th overall on GC. Today’s stage was a triangle shaped crit around the city of Elmore, OH. All the jerseys were decided except for the green sprinter’s jersey, so we knew the pace was going to be pretty high for each of the intermediate sprints.
The course was pretty crazy because turns 1 and 2 were pretty wide open and fast but turn 3 was super tight and you practically had to come to a standstill before the finishing straight. This meant that for each lap we were doing 2 pretty much all out sprints, and doing 60 laps in total meant we did at least 120 sprints during the race. Obviously, this got boring pretty quick. It was just stop, start, crash, start, stop, repeat. I tried to stay somewhat in the middle and make sure that I rolled in with the group for pack time. After about 35 laps in the pace picked up significantly and we shed a number of people from the group. This made the remainder of the race go pretty quick and before I knew it I was hearing 5 to go. I moved up to about 10 wheels back and tried to keep a good position. I made it past a couple of people in the sprint, but I’m not exactly sure of where I placed.
With my pack time I doubt that there will be any change in GC, so I will most likely have ended in 17th out of 50 starters (hopefully they will post results online like they said).Overall I’m really happy that I did the tour. It was an awesome race and gave me a lot of new ideas and confidence that I’m looking forward to using in races to come.
- Nick
