I got third in this race by a bike throw. My bike throw. If I hadn't given the bike a good hurl at the line I would have been fifth.
We had a nice team of five for this race. Me, JT, Kirby, Matt Moran and Luke. We're definitely riding better as a squad than we have in the past, and it showed. We had very simple plans and folks stuck to them. Luke made some attacks, Matt made some attacks, Kirby covered moves and JT and I hung around in the field.
I was still feeling the effects of a blistering Masters 1-2-3 race and honestly didn't feel very good until about three laps to go. With one and a half laps to go, Luke jumped off the front and Kirby, JT ad I rolled to the front and fanned out to keep folks from barging through. It gave luke a four to five second gap, just big enough to make a few folks work hard to catch him.
Usually within two laps to go I try to stay near thr front of the field, as inevitably if you stay up there, you're going to finish pretty high in the placings. It really is just that easy, provided you're willing to put your body through a little pain to stay with the surges to always keep yourself top ten. Honestly, just do it...you're going to hur the last couple of laps in the race, regardless of where you're sitting. Why not get a result from the efforts, eh?
So, I was fourth wheel on the back stretch on the last lap and really fancying my chances. At about 200 meters to go I was second wheel and I jumped really, really hard. Like 1270 watts hard, which is a lot of power output for me, personally.
I got a couple bike lengths gap and kept sprinting as hard as I absolutely could. At about 75 meters to go I felt someone off to the left of me and realized folks were starting to close. I was really gutting it at this point, and by the time I was a few meters from the line realized I wasn't going to win, but that second through fifth were going to be decided by a bike throw. So, throw I did, and I got third by what looked on the tape to be a couple of tire widths.
I need to do some more work on the sprint...with track season starting, that should come along quite nicely soon enough. It was a real pleasure to race with the team, and as a team.