Greenbelt 5/14

Raced my first road race of the year last night, the Greenbelt "training" race. It's a good experience in concept. Ride out to the race- nice 30 min warm up, race for an hour, ride home for 30 mins for cool-down.

I could be grumpy about some of the riding etiquette in the race, but really it's not worth writing about.

I came away with somewhere around 10th place, although the 'official' standings (13 deep) don't list me at all. They also don't list the guy that was in 6th at all. Woops. I guess there are some bugs in the MABRA scoring system still to be worked out.

I always feel that I could have gone faster at these races. It's not that the race 'went badly', rather, I didn't punish myself enough to come away saying: "Well, there was nothing more in the tank on that last sprint, I couldn't give it any more." It's a training race after all, so why not go hog out and burn all the matches? A voice inside says, "ride off the front and burry it for as long as you can." why not? The other voice says, "but it's so comfy to stay in the pack, plus you get to work on your pack riding skills..." I think I need to go with the first voice next time.

I will say that my stomach was burning in that last effort, and I was seeing some stars but it didn't hurt in a satisfying way, maybe that's because I'm a sore loser. There's always next week.

There were lots of familiar faces out there pulling some hard efforts, awesome to see that. I'll be back for more.