Pinche Pass

Sunday pain. While the Panoche Pass road race said nothing about time trial, it was a 47 mile road race, and a 20 mile time trial all wrapped up into one for me.

Heading out, I chatted it up with ol' Dylan Casey. It's been a long time since I last saw him as a young UCSB student/punk, before he went Postal. He's a husband and a pop now, doing to Google thang, but he's got the Postal connection riding for the Disco Geezers.

Heading over Panoche Pass, Sassy pushed the pace some. I took it over the top, then held on in the back of the pack for the descent. And damn, the semi-flat before the turn was hair raising fun. 40+ bumping around on some fairly poor pavement.

Then it was serious echelon time. I weasled my way up to the last bit of the tail, trying to avoid the pull through. However, I did contribute a bit.

Going over the bump before the turn around, I let the climbing legs warm up a bit. Not too much of an effort, more to see who would respond. No one.

Then the bump after the turn around, J. Boyer led up to the feed zone (immediately after the turn around and at the bottom of the bump), and I said, maybe somewhat softly respecting his TDF pedigree, “don’t attack in the feed”. I thought he slowed it down a bit, but it was still hard to grab a bottle at the speed we were going. After I slipped the bottle in my cage, I looked back, and we were gone, screaming up the bump in the big ring. Okay, here we go. Sassy made the huge effort and bridged the gap, with a couple of others, making it 9 going over the bump, and dropping down into the crosswinds. We worked it pretty well, and it was clear we were gone.

Trouble in the engine room, though. I sat out a couple of pulls when we turned into the mondo head wind, but sucked it up and got back in line after a few rotations out. When we hit the pass, I did the Grewal. Feeling off, go hard. Plus, I thought that my legs might be better with the climb. And at first, it felt like that was the case, stringing out the group and believing that I was causing some hurt. But that did not last long. Snap, crackle pop, gone half way up. Pinche Pass.

From that point on, it was a 20 mile lonely journey to the line. Okay, so some dropped 2’s came by, and I hopped on for a couple of turns. However, I did not think that was right, so I dropped off the back. Yet, they did not drop me. I kept pace about 40 meters back, and caught up every so often. In the end, I came across the line for 7, about 2 minutes back from the winning group. Congtrats Sassy.

Mt Ham next week. Legs, and stomach, don’t fail me then.