Tour de Ephrata: Mt. Pain TT(Not Just a Clever Name) and Crit

As I said in my last post we reconned the Mt. Pain TT course on Saturday.. When we went up the hill I thought this won't be that bad(see the hills profile below in the previous post).. Well lets just say I under estimated how the 5 mile TT effort before the 4 mile hill climb would effect me. The title Mt. Pain is very appropriate as I don't know that I've ever felt that much pain during a bike ride. Once again I was disappointed with my result but impressed by the guys on the team. Both Bryan and Jim had excellent times in the TT and the efforts pushed them into top spots in GC.

Once the TT was over we had to kill 4 hours waiting for the crit to start in downtown Ephrata. A couple of points about the crit...

• Note to self don't start a 90 rider crit in the back....I know better than that.. It took about 20 minutes of really hard racing just to get up to the top 20 racers.
• Crits are dangerous... We had 2 guys go down in the crit .. Both Chuck and Jeff were okay, but man its not fun to hit the pavement at 30+ mph.
• Its tough to get your body to work hard after you've abused yourself in a grueling uphill time trail... Why am I doing this? Oh because I love to race.... Yeah that's it..

As a team we competed well in the Crit and our efforts for the weekend were rewarded with Bryan getting 5th overall in Cat 5 and Jim getting 3rd overall in Cat 4. To the wounded speedy recoveries. I'm including a link to the complete results for our weekend of racing.