State TTT

This race wasn't actually on my calendar, but one of the team members had a family emergency and had to cancel last minute so I stepped in. We were a composite team (2 from my team, 2 from another) and we only had one brief practice, but we really meshed pretty well.

There was only one other cat 3 team racing, so we pretty much knew we had silver in the bag :p. My 3 teammates had been racing at a big track festival (its a qualifier to go to nationals) Friday and Saturday, so we knew that they probably wouldn't be on top form, and as for myself, this wasn't on my schedule and I'm on a build week training wise, so I'm pretty sure I wasn't at my freshest either. In all we still did quite well.

The course was cut down to 25 miles from 32 for some reason (I still don't know why...) and we finished in 1:03, 2 min behind our competitors and I'm pretty sure only 4 min behind the W1-2 winners. We all stayed together for the first half of the race, but the person who'd done the most track fell off after the turn around (your time is calculated from the 3rd person across the finish). It was good to keep her on as long as possible. Even if she couldn't take long pulls, she was a great draft and I definitely missed that rest when she was gone.

It's a shame someone had to have an emergency, but I'm glad I got to do this again this year. I've done it twice before, but this is the first time I've done it with a strong team and it was a lot of fun.