Dominguez Hills Crit, 600th Time This Year

Ciao!

Time to update. Not the best day for it, as I banged my right knee pretty badly earlier today while lugging a barely carry-able coffee table through los feliz (table made it ok!). This report's a bit late, forgive me, but as I'm always quick to rationalize -better late than never...meh.

More preface....i've hardly been training this year, and same on the racing front. I don't even have a USCF license yet! It's June! I wasn't planning on racing at all this year, but the crew at Predator Bikes were kind enough to provide some support and motivation to get out and pin a number on once in a while. So I did...CBR. Been helping out at races, and it's been nothing but swell times. Happy (and sad, from a comedic point of view) to say that Chris Lotts is a lot kinder to the lower-cat dudes pinning up for the first time. The "speech" as we know it is pretty gentle now.

Ok...so I raced the DH course for about the 6th time (i think) this year. ZERO results thus far, even after lapping the field a month or so ago, but some really solid racing, and each race has developed differently. For this race, I was on my brand-new Predator team bike, with HD cameras mounted front and rear...so might have some video to show off when those come through. So pinned up, got rolling. Cameras on my bike? Front and rear? Of course i'm gonna attack the shite out of the race. Somehow, the fitness (at least for breakaways) is still there, so I rolled with it. First attack stayed off for a lap or two with another guy, but I was really just testing the waters (and the new bike...top marks...will do a proper review in another post). Came back, still fresh, ready to go with another move. Nate Deibler was off solo, chuggin along, and they called a $20 prime. $20 is a big-money prime in the CBR world. I attack hard at the start finish, and got a gap. Former team director (from Sixtufit PAA) Armin Rahm sneaked onto my wheel. Pull him along turns 1, 2, 3....I started to fade, and Nate was still a good 10 meters ahead. I put my hand back for a sling to get Armin the jump (and guaranteed $20)....but he didn't take it, and we both kinda sat up, exhausted, while Nate took the prime and kept going. Shortly thereafter, former Bearclaw superstar Mike Tettleton (kinda like the cigarettes in Idiocracy) bridged up and nudged me on. I said to go on and that I had nothing...which was true, except all the prime drama gave us a pretty nice gap on the field. Put the head down, and got up there....

Couple laps later, we had a nice little break. Two lagranges (jason bausch & armin), me, mike, that guy from the Time team that won the Long Beach GP, the guy with the massive hair that keeps winning the kom sprint at the end of mullholland from me on the Nichols ride, and a couple others. We rolled around, happy to say "guy with the hair" was popped, and so were a couple others, and we were down to 5 riders....or so I thought. After a good 30 minutes of suffering,a nd getting the gap up to nearly a minute, I pulled off and noticed that there was a 6th rider the whole time. FF. Rookie mistake by me to have let that go for that long, and was surprised no one else in the break cared. I said to the guy (Jas Bausch, LaGrange) "hey, I'm not towing you to the finish, guy." And he said "i'm not taking the Time guy to the finish...bad odds." So I gapped him off the back of the break, and said "fine, you're out of the break then", and i fully expected him to pull through once I did that, but nope. We just sat up, got a 1 minute rest, and were both reabsorbed by the field. He was thinking that his team (which had numbers, but not so much HP) would be able to bring the break back, and get a "better odds" break up the rode.

Never happened. Jason apologized for making the wrong call a bit later in the race, and that's it. game over. Shoulda had a top 5 at least, but ah well. Great to see Mike finish 2nd though. Kid's got alligator blood (i mean that figuratively....as far as I know, Bike Religion isn't yet equipped to handle alligator blood transfusions...).

Fun low-pressure racing. Hopefully I can pull a result at one of those super-late season races that no one cares about... Ciao!