Johan Museeuw "today I need a little bit of lucky"

This has turned out to be an unlucky week as you'll read below. All this followed the flat last weekend at Cantua Creek which I'd hoped was the end of it.

Bad Luck 1. Thursday I had to rush home from work as super supporter Hailey managed to shoot herself in the head with a large catapult and received 11 stitches at the ER. As your can imagine this was a really stressful couple of days as we tried to get Hailey on the mend. With the truck packed up late on Friday night we were ready to roll on Saturday AM.

On Saturday we picked up Drew Touchstone at 8:30 in Menlo Park on our way to Snelling CA for the 27th annual Snelling Race. This is a NorCal classic and always attracts a large crowd of on form Pro/1/2's.

Bad luck 2. Shortly after we turned onto highway 5 a golfball sized rock was shot up from the back wheel of a truck and struck the windscreen of the Xterra right behind the rear view mirror. This created a huge starburst crack in the windscreen than grew to the whole length of the screen within the next few miles. Not much we could do about it but carry on.


The Cracken.

We arrived at the race and the wind was howling! I'd woken up this AM and looked at the weather report. The first thing that I saw was a severe weather alert for the Snelling area warning about high winds and blowing dust.

The report wasn't wrong, the old barn next to the parking lot was coming apart as chunks of the corrugated steel roof were flapping loudly in the wind. I was planning on riding my old Mavic Cosmic Carbones, they're from 97 but still great wheels. After a shot test ride I decided to go back to the box section Ritchey wheels as the wind was just too much.

The race started with the normal neutral roll out to the course with one difference, we all had to stop and put a foot down as we started the loop. No idea why, but they added this for today. The whole group was very nervous for the 3.5 mile rollout and there were nearly a bunch of crashes as people over reacted and locked up their wheels just or went off the road.

The neutral rollout

The first lap seemed fine with some strong teams pulling into the wind and stretching the peloton out into a long straight line. I was fighting to stay near the front and out of the wind. My whole goal was to hide as much as possible and stay as near the front as much as I could. Just after the feed there was a crash just next to me with about 20 people getting tangled and falling off the road. The front group took things easy for a few miles to allow people to get back on. Looking back at the picture it seems that the second group never got back on. I'm in the front 50 out of the 130 starters with the rest of the field shattered behind.

Where's Waldo?? See Drew just coming in to get a bottle from Super Supporter Hailey.

Things heated up on the third lap as we hit the cross winds on the back section. You could tell something was going to happen as everyone was trying to get to the front. I made my way into the front few rows as was comfortable enough as the head winds hit us. The group started to split and I was well placed still in the front group. As we got onto the rougher tailwind section I got out of the saddle to close a small gap and that's when I noticed that my front wheel was going soft. This was my second flat in two weeks, I was out of Cantua Creek due to a flat and not it looked like I was going to be out of Snelling too!

Bad Luck 3. I rolled off the back looking for a wheel van and soon found out that there wasn't one. A number of groups of Pro/1/2 riders were coming past me, the last attacks in the head wind must have done a lot of damage as the groups were really split up with large gaps.

Just before the really rough section I pulled off the course and took the short cut to the Feed Zone where Hailey was parked. The new plan was to change wheels and get back into the race for some training and hard efforts with the group.

I made it to the truck before the the field had come through so I changed the wheels as rolled on slowly waiting for the group to catch me. I'd probably missed about 2 miles of the course but figured I'd just hang on the back get some good training miles. The front group of about 40 guys caught me and I jumped onto the back in about the same spot as I'd flatted. As we hit the head wind section again I was really struggling and shouldn't have been, I eventually got dropped on a section that wasn't going that fast. This was weird. I was caught by another group of about 10 guys and promptly spit out of the back of that group too as the pace picked up. After this I looked back at my rear break and realized that it was rubbing on the rim really badly. This is what was slowing me down. At this point I knew it was time to quit. As always with cycling you need a bit of luck and this past week we've really had no luck.

Time to get back to training ready for the upcoming stage races.

Location:Snelling, CA