Boyne Marathon Race Report

Thursday, I came up to Boyne to pre-ride the course. The race was said to be four 14 mile loops for a 56 mile total. The pre-ride took around an hour at an easy pace and turned out to be 10 miles. That made it interesting, would they add laps or not. Since all of my races this time of the year have been endurance races, I haven't realy trained for XC races at all.

Race day, I did my norm-ate whole wheat pancakes and a banana, filled bottles, and went to the venue. It turned out that they put in about 11 miles for a loop and we were still doing 4 laps. My hopes were for more laps, but I was alone on that one. The race turned into a 44 mile XC race, so I had to figure out how to race it. It is a good course, but I had to back off to not push the HR to high. The first lap was back and forth and 3 of us came in together. Lap 2, I lead a bit then backed off and let the 2 go on. On the last downhill, I caught 2nd place and rode for a while until he went by when I tried to keep it down. I caught up to both of them during the middle of lap 3, then let them go again. On lap 4, I passed Mike Anderson and kept up a quick pace for a while. Just before the finish, there is one last downhill, then a long flat section behind the hotels before a paved downhill to the finish. Luck has it, my chain snapped and flew off on the downhill. I jumped off and ran the flat section before I jumped on in an aero tuck on the paved downhill for the finish. I ended up second was pretty happy with the result. I really had to figure out what pace to do, and in the end I averaged 164 bpm compared to my XC race pace of 168.

Today I watched the tour-finally a good race with some strong attacks and surprises. Better than the horrible TT for the Americans yesterday...except I broke my bars LANDIS. I went out for a road ride around Gaylord for my usual 34 mile hilly loop. My legs felt really good and they were not even sore on the hills. A great ride today, and it should be the same when I do it again tommorrow before coming home later in the day.