La Primavera at Lago Vista is probably Texas' top race. This year's edition attracted the Kelly Benefits professional cycling team. This year was my first time racing Lago with the P12's for 80 miles (both days) and my only goal was to finish both days. The course at Lago is pretty much all climbing on the way out on stair-stepping climbs, then it's straight down with a downhill capable of hitting 60 mph. The race on Saturday was extremely tough with only 37 finishers out of 110-120 starters, and I was one of them. For the race on Saturday, I unfortunately got a terrible starting position way in the back. This meant that the first few miles of the race would be focused on moving up. Fortunately, I was able to find a lot of holes in the pack and found myself up at the front in no time. I tried my hardest to stay up there as much as I could and even felt strong enough to put in an attack at one time. With about five laps to go the pack had really shrunken. I started to become a little more aggressive and attacked a few more times. When I realized that there was no way for me to get off and stay off I just sat in towards the front of the pack trying to conserve energy. By the time we had one lap to go (about 5.5 miles) a few people had slipped off the front including Heath Blackgrove (Team Hotel San Jose) and Stefan Rothe (Texas Tough). On the first half of that lap with all the climbing I probably had the best wheel. I was sitting in second behind a Texas Tough guy that was setting a tempo for the up-hill, crosswind section. But, when we did the U-turn to start the extremely fast downhill section of the course I lost a lot of places due to my junior gears. I made a few of them back up on the next small hill, but lost them all again on the downhill right before the finish line hill. I ended up 32nd out of the 37 finishers, but I was definitely happy with my performance especially since the average speed for the last minute of the race was over 40 mph. I'll try and have day 2 up soon.
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