Hogan Report: Well…that’s about it.

Originally posted at Hogan’s Heroes.

Man, I can’t believe the racing season is already over. It’s been a long year- it started with collegiate racing at the end of February and finished with the ABD Fall Fling circuit races a couple weeks ago. I was pretty excited for the Fling races; my goal was to mostly have fun, but I also wanted to be aggressive and try out some new tactics. One new tactic I tried was instead of just waiting for the sprint on Saturday’s windy 2-mile loop, I attacked at the start of the second lap and was solo for about five or six laps. I wasn’t planning on staying away solo for all 45 miles, but I wanted to set up Ryan Freund for a counter move or a bridge. I was soon joined by Scott Rosenfield, then Chris Mosora, Rob Kelley, and Andrew Lister, but no Ryan. I worked with the group for the entire race up until five laps to go, when the attacks started. Lister eventually snuck away in one of these attacks to take the win, Mosora soloed in for second, and I duked it out with Rob Kelley for third. What a painful way to take third.

The next day was a 75-minute race on a 9-corner, 1.5 mile course. A couple of laps in, I jumped on Chris Mosora’s wheel as he chased down an attack by Ryan, and the three of us went clear. Despite being a Verizon Masters rider, Mosora was still several points up on Ryan in the GC. So, we did what we had to do and left Mosora behind. Ryan and I rode into the finish 1-2, in what had to be the most painful breakaway of my life. Ryan was motoring along in a huge gear and I was on his wheel begging for mercy. Pretty soon, I went up to him and said, “Hey, can we take it down a notch? Please?!” He looked at me and said,”Just drink more Gatorade, you’ll be fine.” I was thinking “Ryan, this isn’t football!” Somehow I managed to finish after riding 30 or so minutes in the red zone. I don’t know how Ryan does it. I finished off my racing season on a high note, and look forward to training hard this winter so I can hopefully come back stronger next year. First season with the Verizon U25 team…a blast!

Next up for me is lots of training. Also our Purdue cross race, which I’ll be racing if I can find a bike to borrow. Funny, my first ever blog post was about our cross race last year. Now that racing is over my blog posts will probably follow a trend similar to this graph:

However, if anything remotely interesting happens to me and I can somehow tie it into cycling, I’ll be sure to post it on this cycling-related blog. Well, that’s about it, so here’s to a rockin’ fun racing season, courtesy of Joey Iuliano:

Comments RSS You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.