BBS Home        Brone's Bike Shop

Customers

Custom Built Bicycles

Team BBS

News

RVCC

Services

Contact Information

Links

Specials

Town Hall 4 Man Team TT:  Sunday, August 20, 2006, Stillwater, MN.  Well, it’s always good to get your fill of humility and I got more than a dose of it today.  This event was the first of its kind in our area to my knowledge and I had been looking to get on a team which might challenge for the win.  I was lucky to find Dan Casper and the good folks on the Gran Stay team willing to pick me up to ride with them.  I was excited for the opportunity so the Sunday before the event I rode up to Stillwater and put in a practice run with 2 of our team.  I met Dan and Jim Cullen and we rode the entire course.  During that session I felt I could equal Dan’s pulls on the flats and downhill’s but that I might be slightly stronger than Jim.  I was told our 4^th rider, Charles, was similar to Jim in ability so in my mind I was planning on doing a little more than a ¼ of the work.  In hindsight I will admit that this early preconception was very wrong.  Dan is very good at the time trial discipline and to start with I was wrong to consider myself his equal.  He’s consistently had better results than me and I wasn’t his equal on the flats or the downhill’s once race day did arrive.  Jim and Charles were more my equal than I’d given them credit to be and again was wrong to base anything off that brief training session and hearsay.  Are you starting to get the idea this event didn’t go well for me and as a consequence I wasn’t able to help my teammates do as well as they could have?  We ended up losing by 6 seconds to a strong Hollywood-Silver Cycling squad.  I don’t want to take anything away from them because I later learned they misjudged a turn and lost about 10 seconds re-routing and getting back up to speed.  However, I do think with a better frame of mind on my part and an improvement on my technique we could have been much closer.  I’ll quickly give you the blow-by-blow here…We started 3 minutes apart and we were the 3^rd team off.  Our rabbit was the squad from Flanders #1.  The plan was for me to go hard out of the gate as typically I like to start fast in the discipline.  I think I got us up to 36 mph and put in about a 45 second pull (we planned to do 20 second pulls) and I was pretty spent when I pulled off.  Dan was in second position and he carried my speed for a while so now I’m at the back and getting gapped because I started to slow down too rapidly as well as take a wide line away from my teammates to get to the back.  I literally had to rip my legs off to get back on to Charlie’s wheel and by the time I do so I’m second in line and about to go out for pull number two.  It wasn’t too long before I had to skip a rotation (about 15 minutes into it) just to recover some and now I’m not only riding scared but I’ve deflated the confidence of my teammates.  Not good.  We managed to take the first turnaround very smoothly and head back in the way we came and Jim was leading our group verbally and basically calling out when to switch.  Dan increased his pulls in both length and intensity and really picked up the slack for me.  Charlie basically didn’t say a word or change his position or cadence so the 3 of us didn’t really know how he was going but I think his steadiness gave us all a little more confidence.  He later admitted to being on the rivet the entire time and really didn’t have any spare breath to say anything.  He was totally focused.  We passed the start line so there was probably 8 miles to go and I actually recovered enough at this point to increase my turns on the front in both speed and duration.  I was even able to start lending verbal encouragement.  I think the fatigue was starting to settle in as both Dan and Jim weren’t as vocal as they’d been earlier.  We all rode flat out for those last few miles and finished strongly but it was just a little short.  On the one hand I was really excited and proud to have ridden with those guys but on the other hand I went away feeling as though I let them down.  Like I stated earlier, I left a fun event very humble and every once in a while a good helping of humble pie can do a lot for a persons morale.  Thanks for reading!