BCMCA Pentiction RR

Up to Pentiction for the day with Dave Kosick and Geoge McLaughlin for the BCMCA RR...

This is an interesting route, 11km out with a turn around and then back. A little loop to the finish, repeat three times...

About 85m of climbing on the way out over 6kim, about 1-2% grade. You can't quite tell you are climbing, except from the effort. And our group hammerred up it...

Then on the way back a shorter but slightly steeper climb over about 1km, kicking up to 6% for a short bit, but then mostly back down to 2-3%. But for this one you know you are climbing and the group slows down for it...

Overall I think the climbing on the way out was harder... Except for our second time up the shorter steeper climb, I was at the back of our group (50+) as we caught up to a bunch of people on the 60+ group.. We stretched out and by about half way up I realized that our lead riders (5) had a big gap (about 75m)... So I had to hustle and bridge the gap while finishing the climb.

We also had a very strong headwind on the reverse part of the circuit... about +20km... And then a brief thunder shower during the last lap..

The 50+ field was fairly strong. We started with 14 riders and finished with (I think) about 8... Almost all the riders in the group where strong and helping to pull us along. So we kept away from the 40+ group... Unfortunately that also meant a strong field at the end for the finish sprint... I mistakenly ended up at the front, jumped to early to react to some other guys and ended up with about 6 strong riders sprinting over me at the end...

We averaged over 39kmh for the first two laps, and about 37 for the last (dropped a little in the last few km as people pulled up getting ready for the finish, we knew at that point we wouldn't get caught.)