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What Richard saw:
Category: Masters 30-34
Day two dawned with tired legs. More suffering was in prospect, as well as the opportunity to add to the sunburn I received on Saturday, though I made sure that I was more thorough in the application of sunblock this time.
On the menu today was a 3km individual pursuit/TT, a points race and a 4km TTT. For the TTT, Garry had indicated that he would ride, so, including Pritpal, there were 3 FFBC riders there today. It wasn't without mechanical incident as Garry managed to forget that he went through a spate of losing his chainring bolts the last few times he was at the track, and turned up with only 2 out of 5 bolts present in his crank. Garry managed to scrounge 2 bolts giving him enough to ride on.
The pursuit is a hard event, and this being only the second I have done, it was more of a learning experience than anything. I kept it steady for the first 2km and picked it up for the last one, ending up with 4:16, which was better than my previous time of 4:19:06 from last year. Pritpal rode 4:11 which ended up good enough for 3rd. I was 5th.
I was a bit worried about the calibre of the competition I was up against in the 60 lap points race, as most of the riders were Friday night A's, and here was I, a lowly B. Well, I was right. I managed to hang on, but found it fairly tough going, losing a lap to what constituted the main field, though this was rather ill-defined given that there were only 11 riders in the combined 30-39 race. Still, I managed to hang on and finish, 9th out of the 11. Being able to hang on and finish the race was very pleasing.
I had managed to accumulate a pool of 5 riders for 4-rider TTT, so we picked the fastest 4 riders from the morning's ITT. This meant that Sergei Morozov from Stanford joined Garry, Pritpal and myself for this race. We managed to get some quite smooth exchanges going in the warm-up prior to the event, so we were feeling quietly confident for our race. Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men, etc... Garry was gapped slightly by a Pritpal acceleration and couldn't make up the gap, eventually having to pull up to let me through. Unfortunately Garry couldn't get on my wheel, and we were down to 3 riders with about 7 laps to go. Pritpal put in a huge effort at the front, but we had lost a lot of time. We managed to finish strongly at the end and recorded a time of 5:22.
That was the end of a very long day in the sun, leaving the track 9 hours after arriving. The is one final Districts event for us on Friday coming - the Olympic sprint. Pritpal, Garry and I will be riding this, again in a masters category, I suspect.
One final question, wasn't Brad talking about coming down to ride the Districts?
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