At last a race! That’s what I told myself Sunday morning when I woke up. After six weeks of waiting and preparation, I was ready for a hard 200km race, the Tour of the Battenkill, America’s Queen of the Classics. For several weeks, I had already been imagining myself racing at full speed across the dirt sections which this race had in reserve for us – nearly 40km in total, on the roads surrounding the town of Cambridge, NY.
The first dirt section was only 10km after the start of the race; from the gun the peloton was racing full-on. Getting through this first section without any problems the attacks became more frequent as we approached the second dirt section. As soon as we hit this second section two riders broke away and built up a lead of three minutes. When we heard it was up to three minutes Steve came on the radio and asked us to start riding on the front to bring down the time gap. After an hour of work without much success at reducing the gap, and with no other team willing to help, we decided to change tactics and starting to attack the peloton.
We had just passed the mid-point of the race when I attacked to get away from the rest of the group. Riding alone, I quickly caught one of the two riders that had broken away at the start of the race and was confident that I could catch the second as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t catch the BMC rider that was ahead. After 80km riding along I started to cramp from the intensity of the effort that I was putting in. With only 4km to go I was finally caught by a rider from the OUCH armada and had to settle for this across the finish line…
This race was a huge team effort. Unfortunately we didn’t stand on the top step of the podium, but we can all proudly say that we raced to win, and only to win!
n.b. We had 3 riders in the top 10
See new photos. Thanks to Allan
