Col. Becker suggested a Team TT today and seeing that we had six, I got to choose teams since it was my last ride. The I got the idea of enlisted vs. officer. Me, Brad and Tim on the enlisted side and Becker, Harris and Ryan on the officer side. We had a 20 second interval between teams and we were last to go. It might have been better to actually have a plan, but we kind of just took off in a cluster with Tim mashing down to the front right off the start. I pulled in behind him with Brad in tow and we started to get moving at about 24mph. Unfortunately, Tim let off to let me pull right after about a 100 yards and I kind of just took off - at about 28mph. I looked back after another 100 yards and no one behind me in the draft. They were still about a 100 yards away so I stopped pedaling for them to catch up all the while seeing the officer team pedaling away about a 1/4 mile away. Pretty smooth I'd say. Maybe they had a plan?
They catch up and Brad pulls this around the bend and we finally get to the straights and start rolling pretty well. We were pulling for about 24 - 24 mph and about the mile and half mark, I look back and Tim is no longer in sight. We must have dropped him in the beginning of the straights. Oh well, we had to leave him if we were to have a chance. Besides we only need two people to cross the finish for the time to count. So there we are rolling along taking about 20 - 30 second pull times. The headwind wasn't too bad. I changed my position on my bike slightly earlier that morning to compensate so the changes might have helped. The turns were the parts I worried about as I pulled. Loose gravel and some nugget sized rocks could do some hurt at the speeds we were going. I slowed considerably during these when I pulled, but somehow got lucky when Brad is pulling. I'm oblivious to the danger and maybe he was too. We get to about 50 yards to the turnaround point and see the officer crew passing us. We made up about 10 seconds and we're doing pretty good on closing in on them. So getting back to second stretch, we see Tim rolling by on the way to the turnaround point. It kind of sucks to be pushing by yourself in a wind. So now we're getting a but faster maintaining about 26 - 27 on the second half. There was slight tailwind this time, but feeling good on the hammer nonetheless. We decrease the pull times to about maybe 20 seconds apart but still hammering strong for the both of us. Back out the straights, I sight Harris' back, but it looked like he was dropped by Becker and Ryan. Or maybe he didn't. So I picked up the pace to about 27 - 28 and really start hammering. This could be our chance. I could really see Harris now and realize he has been dropped from his group and that's when I went into overdrive and started hammering to overtake. I glanced down to see we were rolling in at 29.6 mph and I decide to keep pulling the last few bends and turns. Unfortunately, when I looked back, Brad wasn't behind me anymore and I had just gotten to the final stretch. So I kept pressing. I flicked my wrist to see the time and it showed 00:19:41. I might actually make it under 20 minutes. I hammered it down, but I was still in a relatively high gear so my sprint suffered. I crossed the line at exactly 00:20:04 and Brad came behind me with our team time of 00:20:24.
For my final event here, I rather enjoyed. I just wished we did the team TT thing before.
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