le Tour de Mont Pleasant

What a shitty weekend. Some days you just can't get results and I am at peace with that, but we had everything that could go wrong, go wrong.

We left Friday and went up to Lancing for the night. Easy 1 hour drive to the race in the morning. The crit was a fairly standard 6 corner crit with a headwind on the S/F stretch. The back stretch went from 4 wide to one lane with shitty pavement. I kept getting gapped out in those two corners. Anyway, this was the worse possible course to tail gun and that was what I was doing. Since I was tail gunning, I was worked and when it slowed down ever so slightly, I was too gassed to try to make a move. Anyway, long story short, I finally got gapped out in turn 6 for the last time and couldn't get back on. I lasted about 25 minutes.

Rick came off not too long after and we watched the race from the sidelines. What really sucked was the race slowed down after I had gotten popped, which it always seems to do. Isaiah and Burns finished but not in the money.

Sunday was a long 106 mile road race. Nice and flat with some rollers. We had a really big field so things were either going to be super hard, or I'll just get sucked along. We started out slow and then things started to pick up. I was a little more active in this race compared to Frankenmuth as I was moving around making sure I was near the front. Two weeks ago, I just camped out in the back.

The race all and all, was pretty boring. There was some bad roads in sections and sketchy feed zones but to sum it up, it was boring. We averaged over 25 mph so finished in 4 hours and change.

The real excitement was at the finish. About 2.4Km to go, some guy decides on the straight away to chop my wheel and ripped out 4 of my spokes out of my Reynolds. I thought for sure I was going to go down but by some miracle I was able to keep it up with a completely floppy wheel. While I was trying to recover, the douche who destroyed my wheel bounces into Isaiah and takes him out. Isaiah almost saves it but in the process takes out Rick and some other guy. Yeah, this is happening right in front of me while I am recovering from my issue. So I'm thinking sweet I saved it... Oh no I'm going to T-bone Isaiah. By some miracle again, I miss the crash and limp toward the finish line with the wheel banging off my fork leg.

I think my wheel is ok, I just need to relace the wheel. However, Rick and Isaiah were not so lucky. Rick's Calfee is in two pieces. The down tube snapped in half right about the bottle cage and the top tube pulled out of the head lug.Seems like the head lug cracked in half and allowed the top tube to come out cleanly.

Isaiah crumpled up his front Edge wheel and also broke the rear. Front shifter got rashed up and probably will need new bars. There is also a crack in the DS seatstay. Add to that, two broken helmets and good thing they were wearing them.

So yeah, race was going well until the crash by some idiot who couldn't hold his line. It all happened so quickly I don't even know who caused the whole mess. One thing is for sure, it's better we didn't know because there might have been some flaring tempers in the parking lot.

It's time for some sleep now.