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What a race!!!! First off I'd like to congratulate our whole Master's team for a great ride on Saturday. Nice ride Randy, Brian, Robin, and Jerry. I got to drive Robin's van behind the group so I got to see the whole 42 miles of action.
Sunday, however was my race and as a team we had myself, Randy, Brian, and Robin. The 97 miler started out with one sort of tame lap however the pace picked up after the hill on Miller "the Killer" road. When the pace picked up a group, that included Brian sort of got a gap, we all came back together again except for one guy from Baton Rouge. That lap on the hill Kenny Bellau (Herring), Sean Casey (Herring), and Russ Walker (Wal-Mart) went up the road and caught hat guy and eventually dropped him. This was dissapointing to me as I was right there with them going up the hill and somebody let a gap open at the top of the hill and I just couldn't close. So after this group went off the race started going HARD as we were chasing the break for the better part of six laps. While this was happening my seat had vibrated loose from my seatpost, so I had to get an allen wrench handed up to me. Well anyway seat got tightened and we caught the break on the downhill coming in to town.
The group settled down for a while until right after the first hill on the course Mike Williams (GNO) takes off, with a minute later Russ Walker took off in chase. There was no real concerted effort by the pack to chase these guys down. At this point I was beginning to have cramps (inner quadricep) really bad. I just kept going as it looked as everybody was hurting bad.
The last part of the race was rather uneventful except for a few attacks from Rob Konrad (GNO) and Andy Bergeron (Whole Foods-Aus), thanks go out to Randy for setting tempo up the hill to prevent any further attacks. The only other major happening was that the officials (without telling us before the start, mind you) stopped feeding with two laps to go. This right when I really needed it. As the officals announced last lap the phrase "Thank God" was heard repeatedly. The last lap consisted of us crawling up the hill, and a bunch of attacks on LA 65. We basically came in for a field sprint at the end and I had nothing left, I passed two guys to get in the money and finish 10th.
-Special thanks go out to my girlfriend Kelly who did a great job of keeping the team supplied with water bottles. -Congrats to all our Cat 4's who rode a great race, way to go Mo, Gary, Rich, Todd, Robert.... -Thanks to all the NOBC master 1/2/3's who rode Sunday's race, NOBC seniors where were you????