In all honesty, I have been preparing for today (and tomorrow) since this time last year. All the training and daydreaming….focused on this race. I can only imagine how well school might go for me if I wasn’t a cyclist!
Through multiple Google-chats with Devin and others to plan my strategery, I settled on the simplest of all plans: be defensive yet aggressive, and make the selections. The course had changed this year so that the start would be more mellow than a mile-long 15% grade one mile into the race like last year. I was worried that a break would get away in the opening miles and ruin my chances, but I would have to take that gamble and hope that the brutality of the course would do the selecting. In the pre-ride yesterday I got some good practice for handling the descents at speed, since some of them were actually quite technical and had hay-bales on the outside of the turns. My legs felt great, the weather would be nice, and I knew the course…everything was coming together.