le Tour de Dyess - CycleRoad Race

Race started and we had a five rider breakaway. I stayed with the lead pack and settled in for the ride. The lead group riders were great about swapping the lead often and worked as a team; kept the pace high and quickly left the remainder of the field.
Ran into some lap traffic in the third and fourth laps. Chase car traffic in the fourth lap dropped our fifth place rider; how does Tony say it "Like third period french"? LOL! I thought of that when I looked back and he was gone.
The final sprint came a lot earlier than I expected... over 3/4 mile left to go, dude takes off with four corners left to go. Caught us all off guard and I fell back to fourth. Our whole lead pack was split up to singles now. I'm pushing hard to catch third and watch as the first place rider misses the last turn to the finish line! He blew right past it! Third place guy does the same thing! I'm yelling at the flagger guy "Which way?" just to make sure. Make the turn and sprint hard to the line for a sweet second place finish.

I ran out of gels a few days back and didn't make it to the store. Not sure if I really needed any for this short of a race but at least one wouldn't have hurt. I did have two bottles of diluted gatorade.

A few laps around the parking lot to cool down my legs then walked around cheering the other riders in.


Pace was good but I had trouble leading the pack at that pace for very long.


Course was not marked well - not paint or chalk on the ground - only soft spoken flaggers at corners. Pace truck on the first lap took us the wrong way for one small section and also slowed down way to slow in the corners. We actually had to yell at him to move out of the way - funny now, not so funny when we were hard braking to avoid the rear bumper.
An overall decent effort for the coordinators - none of which have ever operated a race event before.