Sunday, April 20, 2014

Neilson's European update

Today was the second stage of Ster van Zuid-Limburg.  After racing my second time trial ever, and my first time trail on a TT bike yesterday, I was pretty far down in the GC. So, I went into the race today with very little stress. The race consisted of two 30k loops followed by four smaller loops to equal out to 113k. 

In the first 60k of the race I was staying at the front throwing out attacks and chasing attacks with my teammates while trying to get food down. Unfortunately nothing that I went for or instigated stayed away and for my teammates it was the same.
Once we hit the short circuits, my teammate Jonny Brown told me that there was a break up the road that needed to be chased back since we didn't have any teammates in it. So for about half a lap, we worked at the front to bridge the gap. Once we were three quarters of the way through the loop, I gave one last huge effort to do what I could to bridge the gap. Once I finally got out of the wind, about five guys on Team Avia hit the front to bridge the rest of the gap, and in the process strung the field out and put me in the box, but fortunately I was able to hold my spot and stay in the lead group. 
 With the race all together now, I tried my best to stay out of the wind for the rest of the race, but even when I'm in the slipstream of the peloton, I still had to put major efforts in to hold position. 
During the final lap, everyone started to do everything they could to get to the front. So that means about 150 riders are cutting each other off and attacking from the outside on very narrow European roads. This all resulted in two huge crashes which I fortunately was able to escape without losing any skin. But the second crash which was 1.5k from the finish was across the whole road which forced me to jump off my bike after almost going over my handle bars and hop over a few riders and thrashed bikes.
Overall, it was a good day, no one from USA went to the hospital and I learned so much. The final stage is tomorrow (120k road race) and will most likely be even more aggressive than today. Let's go! 
Neilson
 
 

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