Le Tour de Sainte Genevieve - Missour State Road Race

Yesterday brought both a tough course and ridiculous heat for the state road race down in Missouri. Maybe not the best choice for my first race of 2010, and maybe my 5th time on the road bike this year =) Dan and Greg conveniently left out any discussion of "hills" in their hyped up discussions aimed at getting me to come race. Water was the biggest issue for me, and Sprock will agree to that. I forced myself to conserve on the first lap, then was too thirsty too late, and went through the pure water fast, and had no desire to drink my Heed mixture. I was able to convince a spectator to give me a Gatorade on the last climb!

I'll leave the other guys to share their results, but the 3's race started off slow but ramped up fast at the first slant in the road. Each hill brought out attacks and suffering! Sprock took the first pass at the KOM hill in an impressive out of the saddle climb. I sat in for most of the first lap (37mile laps) then went to the front before the feed zone since I had no hand up support and I didn't want to get caught up in the madness. I stayed at or near the front from there on out, and just tried to ride more tempo instead of the surge and brake riding that was happening all day as people failed to pull through. We chased down a couple riders that had a 3 minute gap soon after the feed zone, and the pace stayed pretty high until the hill section started back up. Gaps started forming and eventually a group of 16 was separated, which lost contact with for a few miles before regaining it at the base of the KOM hill. But it was not in the cards for me to hang on... I stopped near the top and got a Gatorade from a friendly spectator, then finished alone, catching a couple P12 juniors who couldn't finish on the way in. 17th was the official result, I'm guessing 35-40 lined up to race.

Garmin Data shows the suffering below... 165 Heart Rate for over 3 hours, almost 4,000 feet of climbing.