Wednesday, June 9, 2010

My First Race!!

This is from a new road team member Gabriel Holmes who recently joined the road team. Welcome to the team and great job!

My first race at PR last night was a whole lot of fun. I think most of the night I was alternating between holding on for dear life and thinking "this is no problem." Even after everybody's advice about where to be in the field, it seemed like I ended up rubber banding from the front to the back and side to side most of the night. I think there was only one brief point in the whole race where I was actually riding in the middle. Somewhere close to the end, I actually found myself at the very front right after the bleachers. The series of thoughts that went through my head were "Holy Crap, there's nobody in front of me." "Hmmm, the wind up here sucks." "Oh man, I am running out of gas. What do I do? Guess I'll pull off a little."
Then it started to rain. We had been doing flat ccw but they changed us to do the escape route. I slowed down a bit since I was a little sketchy about where we were supposed to go. I figured that I would just follow everybody else. I ended up near the back though. Coming down the hill, there were a lot of guys putting on the brakes and I felt like I was going through an obstacle course of hoses. Then coming up the hill, I tried to pick a wheel to suck but guys were running out of gas left and right. Everybody started to get strung out.
The last lap, I was way in the back and got dropped but sprinted at the end and almost made it to the back of the lead group. All in all, I ended up finishing and not crashing so I was pretty pleased with myself.
Next race, I might try to focus on trying to position myself instead of ending up wherever fate decided. There was one point where I looked over and saw a bunch of CycleU guys a little in front of me all the way over on the right side when I was on the left. I thought, "Ok, how the hell do I get over there?"
I want to say thanks to all the CycleU team members at PR last night. Everybody was really helpful. I'll try to remember everybody's name and face, but there were a lot of people there. I might be asking some of you your names again. If I call you by the wrong name in the future, I apologize. Also, thanks to all the advice on the message board.

Cycle U had 9 teammates at Pacific Raceways Tuesday night 6/08. Way to go!

1 comment:

Shawn Harrington said...

Great to see you out last night, Gabe. That was a pretty challenging race and for you to hang in there says a lot about your fitness. The only way to avoid the riff-raff on the descent to the escape route is to get up front before the hill and then just let 'er rip! Looking forward to racing with you again soon.