Actually not just a cruise, but another stage of the PolandBike MTB Maratohn series. Despite my fear of a boring Sunday in the saddle, it turned out to be a "Great" race!
The 64 km track was sandy, muddy & flat*, just as expected & therefore would normally go in category "Boring"
* there ARE no hills around Warsaw, must drive 200+km if u want hills!
But we managed to make a real good bike race out of it:
Result:
Ended up in 2nd group (4guys) fighting for 4th-7th place a rough 5min after the winning trio, so had to settle with a 6th place overall after a chain jam destroyed my changes to fight with two youngsters for 4th! Time 2.16min for the 64km....yes it's fast & flat in the sand!
Start:
After having dragged up a few guys from 2nd start grp (I sneaked into this grp as I was supposed to start down in the luggage box at grp 5!) we caught the leading peloton approx halfway out, a muddy section and a hill (read sand dune) separated 6 of us in a new 2nd front group and we pushed on to keep the gap.
The attempt to brake away:
As I'm not a sprinter I tried to split the small group on a slight descending sandy track 18-16km out, but nobody could go with me & I decided to fall back to the guys. Ending up in front of a 4-man chasing grp with 14km home is not smart, when it's flat & windy...the drag effect one benefit from lying in cover are simply to great & it would have been suicide to lye out there as bate for the hunters!
So I fell back & spend some energy complaining to the lazy guys in the back not taking their turn in front instead...got some Polish verbals back & quickly found me self in front again!
The finish:
I'm still amassed over the poor bike handling skills of the Waw MTB bikers, but the grp was cut from 5 to 4 on a simple ditch crossing a few KM out, he simply couldn't turn! left the rest of us powering on in towards the city & fighting for positions to the final battle. Would have been in a great position to take the 4th place, win in the small grp fight, but my front rings are close to worn out & they choose to remind me as we entered the last km park single track = big time chain jam & 15sec lost....I picked up one guy, but have to see the two "kids" fight out the battle 50m in front of me.....F*ck!
Anyway a great Sunday race, another trophy to the collection & some great race training before Italy....& oh yeah....as there was a category for "Semi-old men, not yet pensioners" I even got a new trophy to the collection....and what a beautiful one....
Waited a long time to collect this one, but biy was it worth the wait;-)
after that we rushed to the car as more than semi black clouds had be gathering above the nice stadium & 2 sec before we hit the parking it's started poring down...speak abt timing!
When organizers get dry I guess you can see more here: results & pic
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