Treasure Valley Cycling Club

Fun day today at Barking Spider. The course is new this year. They moved the shorter climb to the mesa and removed "Terry's Tumble" or "Death Drop" or whatever you want to call it. Now there's a longer, harder climb with a fairly long hike, and then a bunch of riding around the big hill.

Somehow I ended up on the front row -- couldn't ask for a better start. There were a few really fast guys (I guess if you're an Expert, you can't race with them unless you have an annual license. So we had some Expert guys racing with us on a 1-day license, and it was easy to tell who they were!) After the first hill, I was behind about 10 really fast guys, but had nobody near me and we headed into the big wind. I finally caught one guy and got a bit of a tow past the start area. While I was on the long climb Tom had weaved through everybody and caught up to me. We ended up riding together for a while and that was cool. The heavy winds were headed straight into that climb (a lot of the climbs actually) and made that hill seem a log longer than I remembered!

I lost Tom just before the new steep section and had fun trading places with 2 other folks for the rest of the ride. I started to cramp up on the 2nd lap for the long, sustained climb, but ate and drank everything I had and it held off until just before the finish.

I'm happy with my race. I finished 17th of a total Cat 2 field of 67, and ended up 4th in my age group, with a final time of 1:33:20.