Author: AMCT (page 7)

Road Race

We actually had  a sizeable field compared to years past–5 Aggies (me, Shane, Cody, Herc, and Tom), t.u. had a few riders, and MSU had once again stacked the field.  I wasn’t so concerned with their cat 3 riders as I was the 4 cat 1’s.  Jason and Todd were carryovers for last year, whereas Alexi is a recent addition, as was Josh Carter…husband of the MSU coach.  I was in a playful mood, so at the start line I loudly asked which lucky fella had Haga-duty.
The race turned out to be a comedy of errors for MSU, and I was beside myself with laughter.  As I learned later in the race, here was the sequence of planned events for the race:

1. Carter would attack immediately.  They expected I would follow.  I did.
2. Carter would attack again immediately.  They expected I would follow again.  I did.
3.  Here’s where things went wrong for MSU: After Josh’s second attack, Jason and Todd were supposed to counter and leave me behind.

The way things actually went? I ended up off the front with Josh and and Joseph from t.u after the second attack.  We didn’t really push the pace…just kind of rode tempo for a little while expecting the counterattacks to come flying by.  We checked back and saw we already had a 10 second gap.  Josh blurted out, “Well that’s not the freaking plan.”  He confessed that he would not be working with us, as he was not the chosen rider of the day.  Joseph and I decided we’d keep the pace a nice tempo just as a placeholder.  There was no way we would stay off the whole race, so why burn too much energy?  Funny how things work though, when MSU forgets a simple plan…  By the first climb of the first lap (about 10 miles in), we were out of sight.  Josh was irate with his team behind us.  At this point, Joseph and I had a decision to make:  we could sit up and refuse to drag Josh around all day, and go back to the pack where we would again be outnumbered by MSU, or keep going and hope that we could drop the sprinter on the climbs later on.  We pressed on.