Nate leading the peloton in the Men’s A field.

Monday morning coffee and blog post time.  Here we go.

Easterns. Hard. Fast. Jorts. People eating all of my mac-n-cheese.  That about sums up the weekend.

Saturday: Early wakeup after getting into State College at 10:30 or 11:00 on Friday night.  Thanks for waiting for me guys (had a day full of lectures at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center that I had to be at until 4:30pm)!  Sat in a van longer than usual because the races got delayed an hour.  No one was sure about that though, so I kitted up an hour and a half plus before my race, highly unusual for me.  Practiced wheelies in the grass during the morning too, they’re coming along slowly.

Race time: Dylan and I showed up fashionably late to staging, as instructions had already started.  Huge descent early on in the course, UVM guy(s) with speed wobbles at 45+ mph, but then things settled down.  With 3 laps and 3 times up the Black Mo’ climb, surely we’d take it easy the first time up, right? WRONG.  MIT (although I didn’t see it, it’s just what I was told later on) hammered it on the climb (4-5 miles long) and shattered the peloton.  I dug deep at the beginning and then settled in and just drove to the top, picking up guys the whole way up and having a few just content to sit on my wheel on the last 1/3 of the climb.  We worked hard over the top to catch the field to no avail.  Dylan and I were in the same group, and after getting dropped on the descent (common occurrence and annoying) I informed him that I was going to enter the chill zone for the rest of the race.  I pretty much did that until the climb came around the second time.  According to time checks on the side of the road, I put 1-2 minutes into my former grupetto on the climb, and managed to catch all of them about a mile over the top.  I was with them when we came around to the start/finish, but turned around shortly thereafter and called it a day.  I was struggling with motivation to race while off the back, and for what I perceived to be 0 points.  Turns out I probably would have gotten a couple, but who knows how Sunday would have turned out if I had done another lap.  I put out some of my best numbers of the season at this race and still got dropped, that’s how fast it was.

Our hotel was in riding distance of the course on Sunday, which is the best thing ever.  I sat in the hotel (much preferred to a van) and did homework until checkout.  Dylan and I rode to the course, grabbed some Starbucks, and got ready to race.  We lost the race to staging, but moved up on the trip to the line thanks to no one closing off the left side of the road.  The crit was fast from the gun, with attacks flying the whole time.  It took about 15 minutes for me to settle in, and at that point I was able to move up, and didn’t move much from the top 10 after that, and I didn’t want to.  The course was technical, and much harder if you were at the back.  The 21 guys who didn’t finish the race can probably attest to this.  The last 5 laps were pretty hard, and Dylan and I were pretty close the entire time.  I gave it everything I had in the sprint, but it wasn’t enough and I ended up 11th.  Finished up tied for 6th for the individual spots for nationals next week, so I’ll be waiting to see if that turns into a spot for me sometime this week.

Post race peep-off performance was sub-par; it’s much more difficult to eat 5 Peeps than it appears.  I finished up the rest of my homework on the van ride home, and we even made it back before sunset.  I’ve had a great year racing for Columbia and with the ECCC and already can’t wait for next year.  Hopefully I’ll be able to write up a nationals post next week at 35,000 feet on my way back to New York, but if not, I’m signing off until next February.