Crank the Kanc

This past Saturday Steve raced in Crank the Kanc, which is a ~22 mile TT UP the Kancamagus Highway here in NH.  The nitty gritty on the race can be scene here  Since it was up in Conway, we had to get up early, first real early morning race wake up call of the season, 4:00 am, OUCH!  Good practice for Quassy though.

This would be our first real outdoor ride since Miami last October.  Well, I had the Wrentham Du in April, but that was only 11 miles.  We had been meaning to get outside for quite some time now, but we got our bikes tuned up and sadly the bike shop we used had nothing in stock for us, so we had to wait another week, but then when they further looked at the bikes they saw Steve's seat post had been cracked (more like shredded), so we decided to not ride outside for safety reasons until the new seat post came in.  THAT issue took two weeks to resolve.  The local shop in Manchester is not a Cervelo dealer, so we had to go to another shop who said they would have the seat post in a week... which turned into two weeks.  Fun stuff.  I should preface this with the fact that we had been using a local guy for our bike needs, but it was almost 40 minutes away and we wanted something closer for convenience, however, if he ordered something, it was always there the next day.  We may need to rethink this whole bike shop strategy...

So back to the TT, I had a Z1/Z2 ride and a Z1/Z2 T run that day so I was going to ride up the Kanc in Z1 (good stuff).  I was doing just fine until the last 7 miles where it got a little steeper.  The first ~15 went by super fast and it was rolling terrain going slightly up.  Then, the last 4 miles were just obnoxious, and I had to throw the Z1 effort out the window if I wanted to simply keep moving forward.  I got to the top and waited for Steve (I took off about 25 minutes before the start of the race and it was in a TT format with one rider taking off every 15 seconds).  I had no idea how long I would be waiting for since I had no idea what time he took off at.  Luckily I stuffed a long sleeve shirt in my jersey pocket and was able to get warm since my jersey was soaked in sweat.  I took these pictures from the top!

I saw Tim Tapply of QT2 cross looking quite strong, and after about 20 mins I saw Steve!

We made our way back down the Kanc and we couldn't chat with some other riders we knew since Steve was freezing due to all the sweat and neither one of us thought to put a drive shirt in my jersey for him.  The first 4 miles down was fun, no need to pedal and the braking situtation going downhill is getting better, I barely touched them at all!  Now, I just need to get more comfortable being able to move faster by hammering the pedals while going down.  I feel more comfortable on the bike each season though, so that's a plus! 

We then made the drive home and made a pit stop in Meredith and grabbed some lunch.  On our way back into town we kept up our tradition of having a beer post race and grabbed this bad boy from Bert's

It was a gorgeous late spring/early summer day so we just sat out on the back deck until the sun went down.  It was nice doing normal people things for a few hours!

We have Rev3 Quassy in just under two weeks, eeek!  Super pumped and excited about it since it's the first A race of the season and we've both been working hard and spent long hours in the dark and cold basement on the trainer since November.  Should be interesting since we will only have two rides outside under our belts when race day rolls around.  Hopefully all that hard work and gains we've both seen indoors will translate to outdoor riding.  Rev3 puts on a great race and is super family friendly!  I just read each race participant will get two free tickets to the amusement park, so any of my family that wants to come to CT can get in for free!