BC Senior Games Wrapup - 2 Gold, 1 Bronze

BC Senior Games finished... results the same as the Comox weekend earlier this summer. I finished 1st for TT and HC, 3rd for the RR. Bill Yearwood was 2nd for the TT and HC and 1st for the RR.

The RR was going reasonably well until the finish. The plan was to follow Dave Kosick and Bill Yearwood through the final corner and then sprint to the finish (about 300m).

Unfortunately we caught up with a lapped rider right at the corner... Bill and Dave managed to get by him but then he turned across me so I had to go really wide loosing all my speed and letting Bill and Dave get (at least) a 30-40m gap...

Then with the bumps and whatnot getting around the obstacles my chained dropped to the little ring and I was sitting there spinning... took a few seconds to find a cog suitable allowing Pat Ferris (I think) to almost get by me... Got a gear with about 100m to go and managed to get back to 3rd just at the line.

Today was the HC... As planned I did it on the TT bike. I knew that Bill and Dave would do well over that distance. Both are strong but don't have as much endurance. I can beat them on longer TT's and HC's (like Seymour, Cypress or Mt Washington...) but 4-5 minutes would be a lot tougher.

The end result was 4:24. Bill at 4:33 and Dave at 4:36.

Neither of them used their TT bikes (although Bill did use an aero helmet.)

So assuming I was correct in thinking 15-20 seconds advantage for the TT bike... it looks like that got me the Gold... :-)

The TT bike was setup with my climbing wheelset (Bontragger XXX Carbon Wheels with Vittoria EVO CS Tubulars) which are about 500 grams lighter than my normal race or TT wheels.. and a 12x27 cassette.

I started in the big ring and shifted to the little ring about .6km in where the grade gets over 3.5%. Then shifted back to the big ring at 1.45km where the grade drops back down below 4%. This worked reasonably well to allow me to keep my cadence up. Overall cadence averaged 89. Which was quite comfortable for the TT bike.