Mansfield Madness 3/4

[rraymond]

Cycling is an interesting sport with how much you can push the body everyday. I spent the morning lying down with a headache after getting my ass kicked yesterday, wondering how on earth I was going to be able to race in the afternoon. My goal was to sit in and do as little work as possible. Spoiler: I did manage to race but nothing went according to plan.

There were about 50 people at the race and the pace started off fast with me dangling on the back (seems to be a trend for the first 5 minutes of every race I've done). There were a couple of short lived breakaways attempts but nothing that looked dangerous. Then I see someone from ccb and what looked to be Matt Shafer from GLV with a steady gap. (Note to self, get prescription sunglasses because it wasn't Shafer). The rest of the field was slowing down so I rolled to the front figuring I could keep an eye on the break. I led through the turns and I looked back but there was nobody behind me so I decided to scrap my plan and bridge up.

When I got there the not-Matt-Shafer guy fell off the back so it was the ccb guy and myself trading pulls wit 30 minutes left in the race. Luckily 4 guys bridged up after another 5-10 minutes so it was 2 GLV guys, B2C2, and Butcherbox. This represented most of the teams so I figured it had a chance.

Worked well together until 10 minutes to go when most people started skipping pulls. It got less and less organized as the laps counted down. I pulled through half of the second to last lap and again for half of the last lap because nobody else would and I didn't really care about a result- I was just happy to be in the top 10 for the first race of the season. So everyone started sprinting when pulled off but managed to hang on for 5th out of the 6 man break.

There was a big crash in the field in the sprint so I'm glad I wasn't there. Jason Tinkov managed to avoid it and came in 6th in the field sprint.

[cbusick]

Go Robbie

[JeremyC]

Nice

[Jacob]

Good job!

[pace21]

Imagine if you didn’t do that “openers” ride yesterday lol

[oscarp]

Robbie, you are a machine!

[peterkuhn]

maybe you should try getting headaches more often

[jraguin]

Awesome Robbie. I have no doubt seeing what you could do in San Diego.

[Deltabrian]

Colin Reuter has a blog on that break along with the last lap vid. You can catch Robbie in there.
http://untilthesnowends.blogspot.com/20 ... t.html?m=1

Nice job man!

[rraymond]

Good to know that the guy who was skipping pulls for most of the race was also the guy who yelled at me to take shorter pulls.

[pace21]

It’s not bad advice. You probably could have taken Colin’s advice, skipped some pulls yourself and then attacked and dropped him (and maybe another?) from the break at some point. Maybe that gets you on the podium? Yay bike racing!!!