Saturday, April 10, 2010

Limburg and Roubaix



The last two stages in Limburg went pretty well, or a lot better than the second stage at least! Stage three was definitely a race I would call epic with hail starting to come down from the skys about 40 km into the race. Being a true blood Texan and everything my first instinct was to attack. I rocketed off the front of the pack on the next KOM and brought 6 others with me including my teammate, Ryan Eastman. We worked well together and quickly built up a lead of about a minute. On the finishing circuits with about 12 km to go I blew HARD on the long, steep climb and ended up getting caught by the pack and then spit off the back of that. I ended up finished 8 minutes back...haha. The final stage was probably one of the best. I got into a 10 man break about 10 km into the 125 stage. A group of about 5 that had Eastman in it bridged up to us about 15-20 km later and we had about a minute. We all worked somewhat well together and stayed away until about 20 km to go. I looked back and saw the pack about 5 seconds back on the climb. I then attacked off the front of the break and three others came with me. Next thing we knew it was about 8 km left in the race and we had 45 seconds. Two others bridged up to us which made it 6 of us. We ended up staying away until the finish. I tried to suprise the break going around a turn with 250 meters to go and got a small gap, but I blew up with 50 meters to go and ended up finishing 5th on the stage. Still not bad at all. Tomorrow is the junior Paris-Roubaix and the for the first time in three years the Junior National Team will be lining up on the start line.

1 comment:

Ryan said...

Hey. Congrats on Paris-Roubaix!!! I saw your name on cyclingnews.com. It's great to see Americans on the podiums of the worlds best races! Keep up the good work. It's fun to read about all your attacking.