Since my move to Plymouth, Hines has now become my home training turf. So one of my big goals this year was to win this event and really just prove to myself that I could get back into better fitness then before my Achilles injury. The main thing lacking post injury had been my endurance and the motor to really push hard for a time trials. While endurance had been covered earlier in the year, I wasn't 100% sure the motor was back to 100%. Hines is always a somewhat illusive out and back 20k run. You really never know what the wind will do, it often swirls and always feels like its in your face. Luckily this year I had gotten lots of practice riding the course and knew exactly what to do given every scenario...mostly. The weeks leading up to the race have been hard, I have been working hard to push myself to levels I have never been to. The main goal is Cherry Roubaix this weekend, but this race was a key component. Like Milford I choose to train through the race meaning I didn't really hold back during the days leading to the race. This actually worried me a bit since my mountain bike ride in Kentucky Thursday seamed to hurt the legs a lot. It could of also been the 11 hours of driving I had to do and walking in a car assembly plant for several hours on my busted foot. From my own diagnosis its pretty dang clear I have a stress fracture in my Navicular bone of m left foot. Going to a doctor wouldn't give me any better news and just cost too much money. Its hard to see in X ray and normally needs an MRI or other expensive scans. The main solution is just stop running for a few weeks...I can do that. Wednesday I had decided to run 6.5 miles, probably not the best idea since the stress fracture occurred two weeks prior when I tripped I believed. The run also proved to me it wasn't just a bone bruise and something was busted. Anyhow that along with my work trip left me really tired riding Friday. So Saturday I did the opposite of what I thought was right, instead of an easy spin I did 1.5 hours of hard tempo. So for Sunday I was never really sure what I had in the tank till I started.
My warm up was nice, but super humid. Temps were in the low 70's which was nice, however towards the end of my warm up the sky opened up and starting dumping rain. This was the only scenario I hadn't done before. The perfect storm was brewing, Michiganders tend to hate rain...however Oregonians like me love and live for it to race in the rain. So I ditched my sunglasses and rolled up to the line knowing today was my race to lose. I started hard and just kept a nice steady pace out and then back. I managed to catch a fair amount of the Cat 4's that started before me. I didn't care I was the first Cat 3 out, no one was catching me in the rain today. When I came up towards the line I saw I was in the 27's, meaning I was gonna hit my time goal of sub 28 minutes. I ended up crossing the line in 27:52, a new PR and at the time the 3rd fastest time of the day. Later the rain would stop, however my time held up to be in the top 15 of the day and good for first in Cat 3. Without the rain and the tired legs I could have probably been in the top 5, the gaps ahead of me where not large but just hand fulls of seconds. However it was nice to get my first category win in a time trial and the first ever on the road. $50 bucks for the win was nice to.
This weekend will be the hardest test of the season. Cherry Roubaix I will be doing a 6 mile TT Friday, a 35 minutes Criterium Saturday and a 70 mile road race over some brutal hills Sunday. Hopefully all the hard work I have put in will yield some rewards. Also, the Hines TT win catapulted me to third in the Michigan challenge series. With the season nearing an end there is still some hope being 12 points shy of first. None the less though this has been my best season ever, some results could have been better but the new methods of training I have used the last two months have paved the way for me to have a really good 2013.
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