This is just a quickie report on the 2010 Des Hanlon Memorial Road Race before I get back to talking about the excellent Ras Mumhan.
The days leading up to it I started to get a bit of a head cold (very rare for me) and some pain in my right knee – I think the pain was due to 5 hours sitting in a car from Ras Mumhan or possibly the pedals being a little wider on my training mountain bike that I was riding during the week. Lots of physio, icing, frictioning and massage and I felt reasonably good on Sunday morning for the 145km classic.
Race was simple – I missed the break (stupid stupid me) - chased very hard with Martin Irvine and Tim Regan (both Irish team road rides) as hard as we could but failed. All the 'big' guns were gone so it turned into a training ride. Mid way through the race the break had 3+ minutes but with 45k to go we had it down to 1:25 and I thought we could pull them back. What happened next was just ridiculous, two very large horses (with riders) where trotting along the narrow road. 70 riders coming at 60kmph down hill spooked them and all hell broke lose. I am very happy to say no one was hurt but the incident was terrible and should not have happened – there should be more than enough warning vehicles ahead to give those riders enough time to get off the road. This incident delayed us by about 1.5 minutes and all our momentum was killed off. I continued riding at the front and finished up getting a good workout in with a bit of a sprint at the end.
Funny, I tried to get a break going a bunch of times, say 7-10 strong riders but everything was chased down, and do you know what the people did when they caught us, they sat up - giver uppers!
Power figures were interesting enough - 333W Normalized Power for the race for me (3:40 ish racing time - I was doing a lot on the front). With close to 30 minutes in anaerobic power zones so I did get a good workout anyway...
Next week – round 1 of the Bundasliga – this will be tough!
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