Tour de Gap
Over a week out from TOFU and I’m getting myself rolling again. Tour de Gap, a great race by the way, was on the schedule and we headed down to Parowan. Since Parowan is mighty small, we stayed in Cedar City. It turns out that you’ve got to make two early mornings since TdG fits in 4 races in 2 days. Andrey Yarbrough puts on a great event. As Hagemonster related in his forum post, Andrey and the Iron County Fair main man were wondering why more Utah racers didn’t make the trip. I was wondering as well. Yes, there is a climbing stage and you know if T-bird is there you are going to suffer. But hey, isn’t that what bike racing is all about?
So the racing went pretty good. I am still working out the kinks from TOFU and some of those kinks actually helped this past weekend at the TdG. After destroying myself off the back on the Nebo climb for 30+K, the Brian Head stage didn’t seem all that bad. However, I was dreading the first few meters of the climb out of the village. You could hear it coming thanks to T-birds wheelset. Fortunately, the group gave chase and amazingly I made it over in the first chase group. Fun and games from then on ensued. There are some great fast descents and more challenging climbs.
While the weekend of racing could have gone better, I don’t feel too bad about it. I pulled off two field sprints, but it’s not quite the same as pulling of the sprint for the win. I’ll spare you the internal dialogue of my TdG time trial and maybe in another post share some better from last week’s Saltair TT that went much better. T-bird said he had to work really hard to win, but it didn’t seem like it when he put 1:45 into the 2nd place finisher on that stage and then won the TT with authority, T-bird is still on fire. Watch for him lighting it up with J-Lao in a few weeks for USPro. We will be seeing a stars-and-stripes for sure this year between those two.
The legs are sore today, but should be ready to rumble for the RMR tomorrow night. We’re running out of racing on the calendar and for some strange reason I’ve been thinking of barriers and clogged pedals. I was trying to find some QOTSA music and ended up finding another of Josh Homme’s bands, EofDM (Eagles of Death Metal). They rock!