Last day of the first stage race with the team for 2015. After being forced out of the Tour of the Gila with a knee injury I was very happy to start the 3rd day without any pain, and with reasonable legs.
To round out the Killington stage race there is a 17km time trial on the Memorial Day Monday. The course starts on the by this point in the race very familiar highway 4, a winding road along the river, following it until the final 2km where the course makes a sharp right to finish on the flat River road. The first half is a false flat uphill, the second half is flat, with a short steep climb before the turn, with a total of around 120m of elevation gain.
I started the stage in 5th place, equal on time with 4th and 6th, with Chris in 3rd, 3 seconds ahead. I hadn’t ridden the TT bike much this year, but I was fairly confident I could move my self up on GC a bit as long as I didn’t miss the one and only turn on the course like I had last year. Chris can also ride a pretty solid TT, so overall the team was optimistic the morning of the race. Braydon wasn’t able to finish the previous days’ race with his knee and back injury from the crash in the first Stage, but came out to help Bryan get us set up at the start and finish.
We got to the course an hour and a half before my start, and set about preparing my BMC TimeMachine for the effort by removing the cages, checking the pressures and finding somewhere to attach the frame number, eventually settling on a complicated tape arrangement extending from the seatpost, and had some Jet Fuel C. 45 minutes before my start time I rolled out of the parking lot to start my warm-up, spinning with a little bit of race pace to get comfortable on the bike. I rolled up to the start, had a gel and 5 minutes later sprinted out of the start house.
The effort went fairly well, I started a bit hard, and dialed it back a bit much in the middle for fear of fading at the end, but with about 2.5km to go I was able to open it up a lot and caught both my 30s and minute riders. I finished feeling I could have gone harder, but for a first TT of the year I was satisfied with how I’d done.
Chris came through a couple minutes later, and after getting some food an fluids we cooled down for 20 minutes and came back to look at the results. Chris rode to his second 3rd place in 2 days, and I had placed 5th, at 28 and 32s behind the winner respectively. That was enough to move Chris into 2nd overall, and me into 3rd, the winner from yesterday had ridden well enough to keep the overall lead.
So that ended a fairly successful Killington Stage Race for Jet Fuel, we had one more day in Vermont before leaving for North Carolina, and we made the most of it with a 155km loop over to Mt Ascutney. Stay tuned for reports from Winston Salem and Philly.
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/311690490
Results: http://www.killingtonstagerace.com/2015results/stage3/promen123.pdf#zoom=100
http://www.killingtonstagerace.com/2015results/gc/promen12.pdf#zoom=100
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