NWA Spring Classic

The week after the Hells Kitchen race was a recovery week. Last weekend I decided to do some testing to see if my numbers had gone up much. The workload I've been doing lately has included a lot of 10 to 20 minute SST type stuff, so my 5 minute and up numbers were really good. My 5 second and 1 minute numbers were up some, but not where they need to be.





Last Sunday was a nice day for a family ride. Coatney and I loaded up Chloe in the trailer and did a lap around Lake Hefner.




So yesterday was the NWA road race. It snowed pretty good here at my house and as we were driving up to the race, it had snowed a LOT in Tulsa. It looked like for a while we were going to be in for a wet and mushy race. As we got into Arkansas, it started to look a lot better. The course was 69 miles total doing 3-23 mile loops.



It was pretty cold when we started, so I decided to attack a couple of times just to get warmed up. The second one almost stuck as a group of 4 other guys bridged up to me and we had a good rotation going. We were off for 15-20 minutes or so before we got caught. A few other guys tried to make something happen, but everything was getting chased down.



About midway through the second lap, I got a flat tire. The guy driving the wheel truck did a good job motor pacing me back up to the field, but I burned a lot of matches to get back on. At this point I decided to sit in for a while and recover.



At the start of the third lap, Brady did one of his stealth attacks and rode away from the field. After Brady was about 30 seconds up, a couple of guys took off to try to reel him in with Erin glued to their wheel. Another 3 guys took off soon after and I jumped on that train. Pretty soon, both groups merged into about 9 guys chasing Brady. Erin and I just let the other guys do the work. We eventually caught Brady and about 5 other guys or so managed to bridge up the the break.



So at this point in the race, it's the last lap with most teams represented in a break. Most had one rider, the Specs team had 2 riders although 1 was pretty blown as he didn't do much of any work. The best part was we had all 3 of the Foss1l riders in. The big hill at towards the end shelled some of the guys. Brady punched it at the 1KM to go point then Erin tried to lead me out at the 200 meter point. I ended up getting 2nd. I came around 6 or 7 guys at the end and was leading, but at 10 meters to go, my legs just couldn't keep it up and I got nipped at the line.



All in all a very action packed and fun race. Our teams last KM needs some work, but we're only going to get better at it. I thought overall the team rode well. Very aggressive but mostly smart.

The OKC Velo club race series starts this Wednesday plus lots of other races coming up.