Saturday, April 27, 2013

Quabbin 3/4 Race Battlefield

Friday 1830 ferry to Bridgeport, CT and drive to Stourbridge, MA for a night stay near the race. Next morning drive up to the Quabbin Reservoir up a beautiful place on top of a hill overlooking the Reservoir.

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Staging for 9:28 start of the 3/4 field -- a huge maxed out size of almost 150 riders -- the biggest field. Neutral fast roll down to mountain, already 1st bottle(s) flying -- WTF.
Then just the nature of no watching out took it's toll on too many riders with no chance to avoid the battle field like pile ups and crunching carbon on pavement.

OK -- post write up addition, need to share this video:



 In brief the following development from Py's perspective:
A scary race of "stupid" crashes (3 total, I only noticed 2 of them, one right behind, one just a rider right of me I could just manage to around, then carbon crunching sounds..) -- from then on split up race, not thinking about anything but getting the hell out of this crap and away -- chasing on passing riders (sorry I did not waited -- for what, for how long -- I did not even wanted to know what was happening behind at this point, had a bad feeling some how) and ending up in a 5 rider group doing a great long TTT effort to chase back on (what a relief on my mind of the previous craziness) -- well almost, we had them so close to almost grab, but our legs were too toast as the group in front stepped even more on the gas... as it felt like and slowly dissappeared again and we some how gave about up on this idea after some good 20 miles of casing. Later a group merged up from behind messed up a little our nice order. Flying on with more men power, little less efficient so. I did a good last move in front flying through this little town on BK like sandy roads, then rolled back to the pack, Karl was in the group behind and moved up at this point -- then it strung out a little and I did the last move up this hill getting a few riders back and the finish came in sight after the 2nd shorter climb of the final section back up to the tower.

Happy been there with no troubles in the way.

Little later the women's field(s) arrived. A few pics of the LLV girls:

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