Fawn Grove Roubaix

4/5/09

Fawn Grove Roubaix

This was without a doubt one of the coolest and hardest races that I have ever done. Out of the 275 or so registered, I think less than half finished due to either flats, crashes or just plain being chewed up and spit out by the tough competition. Every one that I spoke to after the race had a war story to tell.
I did the 35+ and new that I had my work cut out for me with Spinners and Swashbuckler showing up with big numbers, most these guys are cat 1 and 2's but chose not to race the actually 1/2 race for a few reasons. My strategy was to race near the front right away and go with any move that had one of those guys in it. My plan started ok , and I raced at the front for the first few miles until I got caught up in some bad bike handling on a descent, that was pretty much all it took for the good guys to gap us right away. I worked with a few guys dangling in between the front group and the slowly deteriorating group of guys coming up from behind. The group I was with started to fall apart and on the second of 3 laps I crashed hard on a nasty gravel descent trying to keep the front guys in sight, game over for me. I got myself back together and caught up to Cat 4 racer Zach Adams. He was struggling to get through he nasty flat gravel sections and I worked with him until the finish pushing each other when the other wanted to bail. He is a tough young gun with a good head on his shoulders.
At the end of the day I ended up 11th out of the 13 finishers, I think that there was 32 that started in our class. I was happy to have finished and plan on doing it again next year with some more hard training.