Phew...

Much better today. I finished 10th. For what it's worth, 6 of the 9 guys that finished ahead of me also finish spots ahead of me at Cherry Creek, with the exception of one guy that is just plain strong. Here's a shot of my teammates warming up.

I stuck to my plan (sorta!) of trying to keep it in control for the first leg, before the right turn. Gassed it up the little incline, found a spot to recover at the top, then pushed it a bit harder. I popped at that mini-zit hill/bridge before you make the 90 left. Same exact spot as last year! Crazy. This year though, I pedaled as hard as I could, but tried to save some for the final hill. All in all, I felt 10000x better this morning than yesterday morning. This is a definitely a tricky course, because I couldn't really find a spot to recover (unlike CC).

Team TT was fun. I took some monster pulls to try to drag those guys to the hill so I could peel off :-). However, the one final final longer pull I took we dropped our 4th! I didn't know this, so I was crushed at (yet again) that mini hill leading up to the 90 left turn. I had to get back on, but felt it was a bit more important to recover as we already passed the team that started 1 minute ahead of us. Plus, I needed to get something going for the final push :-).

All in all, a fun day, and a re-boost for the ol' confidnence. My power was pretty good. It would have been a "comparable" day to a CC TT. Take out that hill at the end, and, give a downhill to recover, and it'd be pretty close. Plus, figure the avg power and, would be somewhere around a 24:30 or so...a few seconds off my PR there. Not bad considering yesterday's blow-up festival took a lot outta me.

I can now pretty much say with confidence that I am NOT a climber.

Ready to go for this Wednesday.