A few weeks before I went on tour, Molly’s dad wrote to her and asked if I’d heard of the Tour of the Valley, a brand new stage race that was being run right around their home in Ohio. I hadn’t but since tour ended up in Pittsburgh, we decided that we’d spend a week with her parents and I’d do the race on the weekend. Perfect!
Stage 1: Ellsworth TT
The course was a mostly flat, 4-corner, 5.5-mile circuit out in the middle of nowhere. I’m glad I went to do my race prep on course the day before because I was able to 1) know that I could take 2 of the 4 corners at speed on the TT bars (important because of the short distance) and 2) know that the center of the road was the best line on the stretch after the 2nd turn because the rest of the road was all ate up. As with most TT’s, there’s not much to report except that I caught my 30-second man halfway through, and almost caught my 1-minute man. And, oh, yeah, I won! That was pretty awesome. Average speed was 29.3mph.
Stage 2: Downtown Canfield Criterium
Though being the race leader going into Stage 2, a technical downtown criterium around the green in Canfield, that afternoon was pretty awesome, being the race leader going into a crit without any teammates and 60 guys who you don’t know really sucks. I was completely isolated against a couple of stacked teams. I ended up burning a lot of matches having to chase most things down myself. Even when things were extremely difficult and a few of us tried to force a break from the carnage, it became obvious that I was on an extremely short leash. I must say that I missed MABRA during this crit; many of the guys seemed to have no idea how to take corners smoothly. Setting up for a right-hander, a guy in front of me moved right (WTF?!) so I took the wheel he was on, but then he abruptly changed his mind, switched left again and rode me into the gutter. I stayed upright but pulled something in my leg. I basically lost the race with 4 corners to go, when a guy who will become known as “Big Pussy” (the dude on my wheel below) almost wrecked me. I had to scrub a lot of speed and since it was technical to the line, I got stuck finishing in 12th place. I slipped to 5th on GC.
Report from stages 3 and 4 coming later this evening…
