Chapel Series - Race 2

Thursday night was the second of three races in the Chapel Series. I was joined by teammates Marshall Leininger, Jim Flesher, Carl Peshoff, Darrin Kert, Matt Turi and new comer to the team Chris Smith who was secretly riding for SV since he was sporting an FD Jeux jersey. A potential future Stark Velo rider, James Miller also came out to test his legs in his first race. Congratulations to James and for all those guys and gals who come out to this event to participate in the race. If there's one bit of advice that I can give, hang in there and have fun.

I was surprised how quickly a break of five riders went up the road which included Jim, Carl, Darrin and two Orrville riders. Knowing that the Allied Decals weren’t represented in the break, super-domestique Marshall did his best to control the front of the field to discourage A/D from shutting it down. By the time A/D were able to organize some of their riders, the gap had grown enough that bringing it back became impossible for them. With the break safely up the road, it came down to us to keep an eye on things. The race at this point became fairly uneventful with the only excitement coming from me running my mouth. I don’t know what it is but I’ve become lippier lately. Maybe it’s because I knew I had teammates there to protect me from a certain ass-beating. Anyway the story goes like this, before one of the 90 degree corners, a rider from midfield yells something out about going faster through the corners. Being aggravated from guys who complain about the pace of a race while never doing anything about it, I reminded him that it was truly a race and that if he wanted it to be faster, he could feel free to come up front to do some of the work. In hindsight, I probably could have kept my mouth shut because I think he may have been an ‘A’ racer who was just using my race as a warm up for his and was probably aggravated by the ‘slow’ pace of our event. Understand, I would have liked to have gone faster than 23 mph myself but I certainly wasn’t going to up the pace to give 'A' racers a decent warm up and possibly ruin it for my mates up the road.

In the end, the break succeeded for the day and Jim Flesher took first place after a fabulous leadout from Carl who ended up third with Darrin taking fourth. I won the field sprint finishing in sixth and Chris took seventh in his first ever race!

brian

Here are the stats on the race:
Duration: 39:12
Work: 565 kJ
TSS: 57.4 (intensity factor 0.938)
Norm Power: 281
Distance: 15.712 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 1085 241 watts
Cadence: 29 141 95 rpm
Speed: 3.5 34.2 24.1 mph
Torque: 0 313 65 lb-in