race riding

Time for the recap of this past weekend. I didn't have any races this past weekend. However, my favorite organized ride took place. The Rocky Top 100K. This ride has the coolest roads and a super cool post ride atmosphere. The ride leaves from Barleys Taproom and Pizzeria in downtown Knoxville. 15 minutes into the ride you are on some great roads with some pretty big rollers. Last year I "won" the ride, so the big joke around work (we close up shop just for this ride, plus it is always around the 4th of July so that is our holiday. Everyone at work takes this ride very seriously) Is that I was going to defend my "title." Going into the ride, I let Stefan know about it and told it was a great ride. 100k on awesome roads with free pizza afterward, he didn't think twice about coming. Going into the ride, both of us needed more racing, high intensity in the legs, so we started pretty hard. The ride never really got organized. For the first half of the ride, it was mostly Stefan and I doing the work, maybe one other guy at times. About halfway in, I decided I was going to start taking it easy. After a couple of 20+ hours weeks, my legs were shot. Around the 45 mile mark people start attacking and things like that. Around mile 50 Stefan attacks and stays off the front. My stupid boss, Geri/Jerry/Gerry/I don't Know how to spell his name, was being an idiot. We was pretty much sucking my wheel, if I would put in a good effort, he would just sit there and be an idiot. It's like his goal was to beat me, like he (washed up cat 3 from 10 years ago, never trains in the winter, Miata lover) was comparing himself to me. We are coming into something like 10 miles left and at this point I am so mad at Jerry my goal is to beat him, (I know it's not a race) so after a really good break check and some name calling, I "attack" on this climb (3/4 of a mile long). He is immediately 2 bike lengths off the back, then I drill it and get a pretty sizable gap. I start bridging to Stefan. He gets caught by a traffic light and we regroup. It was nice riding into town with my bro Stefan. We had a good time eating pizza. I think our time was 2 hours 47 minutes. Gerrys group was like 2 hours 50 or more, something like that.
After the ride, I went and hung out at Stefans house. The next day, we had another "race ride" on tap. This time, we actually had intervals and what not. Overall, it was a very hot 4 hour ride that was probably 10 times more beneficial than the 100k ride. We did all kinds of intervals in some really hot conditions. After the ride, we were pretty zonked. however, we had to immediately go and work for his parents at a shaved ice place for the fourth of July. Overall, the weekend went really good. I accomplished a lot this weekend and feel pretty good. Now it's already mid week and only 3 days til my next race, the ETJC road race and Crit in northeast Tennessee. I'll be sure to keep my very few readers posted on how it goes. Thanks for reading.
The Crow