O2S

What a great weekend. Amazingly enough I finished yet another race without a mechanical and I felt pretty good to boot! It had to be the chocolate rocks Michelle bought for me Friday on the way up. I had the pleasure of road tripping to the UP with her. Good thing she was there and paying attention to where we were going. I had no map and didn't even know how to get to Marquette. We got registered and met up with our respective people at our hotels at a reasonable hour so I actually got some sleep for once. Woke up and pounded the complimentary breakfast and headed to the start Saturday morning.
I really suck at race starts. I chased all the way to Ishpeming before I latched back on, passing a flatted TJ on the way. He fixed it and caught back up amazingly fast. Chris P. was on the front at this point after 3 weeks off the bike. Freak. The group was about 50 strong at this point. I managed to move up, somehow and got a huge boost when Marko went by. I latched on to him as long as I could. He got chainsuck, fixed it and then got taken out by another dude (not me for once). So I hit Misery Hill in 14th place or so. Holy crap! How does this happen? Where do all those people go? Over the top, I could see 2 guys 15 seconds in front of me. I decided to chase as hard as I could for 10 minutes and see what would happen. At 10 minutes I sat up and waited for the group behind. It had the guy with the Golden Bike in it and he was pretty strong. The group was pretty much letting him do all the work. I sat in to recover and took a few pulls but it was evident nobody else wanted to help. Bitches. I would put in a pull and pick up the pace but no one would pull through but they would all stay on. I could put in a harder effort and create a gap but with 25 miles to go I knew they could shut it down and drop me at the finish. So I waited and towards the end there are a few big sandy areas. These created some separation and my group was down to 4. So with 4 mi to go some guy who was never at the front (we'll call him smart) attacked and I couldn't go. With 2 mi to go another guy went. I chased him and he stayed 10 seconds or so up on me to the finish. I could see 9th place in front of me in the parking lot but couldn't close that gap for sure. I ended up 13th and pretty happy. Not as happy as Lisa, though. She sat in for the 1st 20 miles of the race, moving up the whole time but not killing herself. Then drilled it the last half and ended up in 5th place overall! Sweet cash and finish. It was funny because Bryan and Meat had both finished and I was commenting on how slow she was when I looked up and saw her in the finish chute. Then I looked at the results board and saw she was 5th. More crow please.
Got to hang with the 212 crew at the Bells Brewery after party. Had 1 too many, molested Chris P., annoyed everyone else and called it a night.
Got the invite on the way home Sunday to ride with the Team Pedal Moraine crew at the Reforestation Camp. Nice recovery ride. Yeah, right.
I also got to see Louis and Paco from GT again on Saturday. Nice guys. I was looking forward to riding with Louis and Jesse Bell on Sunday but some storms came through Saturday night and put a stop to that. All in all a really good weekend. Congrats to Mr. Matter on his win, the first jewel in the triple crown.