This past weekend was the Johnson City Omnium in, you guessed it, Johnson City TN. It was about a four and a half hour drive from home, and we left early Friday afternoon so it wouldn't be crazy late getting there (we also lost an hour going into Eastern Time Zone).
The road race Saturday morning was pretty short for the Cat 4s - 30 miles. However, it was pretty much all up hill and the last 7.5 miles consisted of a climb up Roan Mountain with a mountain top finish. From almost the very beginning of the race a group of 3 formed a breakaway. Knowing it was a long race with climbing, no one in the pelaton was overally concerned with chasing them down. Shortly after one guy dropped off the break and came back to the pack, with the second guy dropping off a few miles later. That left a solo rider out there. I remember someone tried to bridge up to him, but he quickly realized that wasn't going to work and came back. I took a couple turns up front trying to keep the pace up, but I didn't want to work overally hard because I assumed he wasn't going to solo the entire way. If he did, he deserved the win anyway. He was ultimately caught at the base of the last climb.
As soon as the climb started, the guys on the front quickly upped the pace. I realized quickly I was really going to have to bury myself to keep that pace and I had to decide if I wanted to do that and risk blowing up before the end of the race (I knew that group would slow a little but I didn't know how much or how soon), or let them go and settle into my own pace. Since there are no 7 mile climbs where I live, this is something I haven't been able to train for so I made the decision to keep my own pace. I quickly ended up on the front of the chase group and settled into to a pace I thought I could hold and even increase on the entire climb. The group behind me seemed to keep getting smaller and I would catch up to guys that had come off the initial group. About 4 or 5 miles into the climb there was a group of two at the lead, a group of three behind them, a group three behind them, and then me and another guy. The group of three in front of us was close enough where I thought we would catch them, and we did with about a mile to go. There were the typical 1K and 500M to go signs, and I was looking for a 300M or 100M sign to make my attack (I was sitting where I wanted towards the back of our five person group). To my surprise, we made a turn and I saw the finish line up ahead. At that point the people in front of me went and I wasn't able to overcome their jump in that short of distance. I ended up taking third in our group sprint, which gave me 8th overall. In a climbing race with 30 guys I'll take that result since the only people that come to this race are good climbers.
After waiting at the top of the mountain to see my team mate Kyle Taylor finish (who got 13th in a deep Pro/1/2 field), we made our way down the mountain and back to the hotel to rest before the TT later that afternoon. The TT was 3.5 miles long total, with a mile long uphill and then a descent before finishing with about a 2 mile flat. I paced myself well at the beginning and the uphill, but pushed myself too hard on the downhill trying to make up time which ended up costing me on the flat. I finished 4th out of 18, but missed 3rd by 1 second. I think I would have made that up with some better pacing...maybe.
On Sunday was the crit. It was a great course in downtown Johnson City, with seven turns. During warm-up I thought I wouldn't like the course because of the tight fast turns, but by the end I was having a blast. I was able to move through the pack and at one point tried to bridge up to a break, but I ended up just dragging the field with me. It ended up coming down to a field sprint and I was able to grab 6th out of 25 guys.
Overall in the omnium I was able to get 5th. I was happy with my results and was able to learn a lot - the only bummer is I finished one place out of the money in the TT and the Crit, and one place out of upgrade points in the road race and the crit.
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