Charlevoix

Charlevoix was another successful weekend for me in Quebec!

TT:
The time trial went well and I managed to finish in 5th place 18 seconds behind 2nd place. You may have noticed that I said behind 2nd place, and you may ask yourself "why 2nd? not 1st place?" well the reason for that is because Alex Cataford won 1:22 ahead of me. Yes a large margin indeed. I am pretty happy since I have only been on the TT bike maybe 4 times prior to and I haven't really yet gotten the groove of the TT yet. I also need to get better at finding a rhythm, I had a really hard time with this on the head wind return.

Crit:
This was also my first crit of the year which was, as I was told very technical, but while pre riding with my dad I felt "this isn't so bad!" .As it turns out we weren't pre riding the race course at all so I had to learn it as I went around the course for the first time. I was definitely in a different class when it came to cornering skills and spent most of the 30 minute race on the back dropping off at every corner. I managed to stay with the group though pretty easily. I just was a little  disappointed I couldn't factor into the race more.

Road Race:
It was pretty easy with some little indecisive climbs for the first 80km but then after about 3 minutes of constant descending I knew something was coming. Everyone wanted to move up and I managed to gain about 20 places riding through some tough sand and went into the climb just within the top 1/3. I spent a lot of the climb weaving through people and yelling for space and popping onto drive ways until I ended up in a group of about 8 and we formed as the lead group on the road. I had Yohan with me in the group and Alex Cataford who was still the overall leader over Yohan by a minute was about 50m off the back. He managed to crawl his way back after what he calculated to be falling off 5 times on the following hills. Looking back Yohan and I should have attacked like crazy to get a minute on him but it didn't come to be. Yohan got in a late move that I was too far back in the group to join and when I tried I was in no mans land and didn't feel like staying there so I drifted back in and tried to do some blocking but Cataford was pretty resilient with his tow of the group and he managed to bring our group back to 20 seconds and I jumped off the front at the base of the climb with 600m to go and got 15 seconds on him and finished 2nd on the stage.

A fun weekend with some great form in the TT and the Hilly road race, which should leave me on pretty good terms for Nationals and KW.