2013 Longbranch Road Race Report and Photos

If you want to see photos of everybody else you can click here !

Yup, that is Evo sitting second wheel in a WHITE jersey with a WHITE helmet.

I made a mid week decision to dig out my numbers and do a reprise of my road season with one last race.   Why another race?  Part of it was an amazing chain of events led me to pull the trigger on this baby:

The cat is out of the bag I'm racing a carbon bike.

But the thought of putting a cat in a bag sounds like it can be its own kind of fun if you ask me.

After years of preaching that carbon has no soul (it still does not) and that there is more to riding than speed (also true), I  have joined the throng of middle aged men on plastic bikes.

I found a deal on a frame and fork in my size (and my size only as a matter of fact) and with the support of Hottie I said, "Yes."  To quote Nick Legan, "Steel is real, but carbon is really fast."

After some shake down rides it was time to debut it and the fine june weather begged me to go fast.

The race features "The Hill." When you speak of the hill on this course, nobody wonders, "which hill?"  About half way around the seventeen and a half kilometer loop (eleven miles) following a set of rollers that sees you using jumping between the big and small ring you come to a climb that is steep and has more false summits than I could count in my hypoxic condition.

We shed some riders on the hill the first time though and I held on through the second time up despite blowing a shift at the base of the climb (still getting the FFCB dialed in).  As is my way, I then lost contact on the rollers following the climb. I then chased a rider for two more laps and still don't know if he was from our race or a lost soul from the Cat 3's.

The course did not have one inch of flat.  The STRAVA profile looks like an EKG.

The pave' was rough and there was plenty of pain to be had under the sunny skies.  I got my share of both.  The results weren't posted when we left, so I will update this later with my results.

Look at my leg........I wasn't even posing..

I will comment more on the frame in another post. I will just say it was everything it was supposed to be.