Elkhart TT

A lot of you are probably asking yourself, “What is the deal with Pavlovich. He hasn’t posted on his blog as of late.” Well, I apologize. The family has been in town, and I had a little thing called graduation.

While my friends were busy tearing the legs off of fellow bike-a-list at Joe Martin Stage Race, I was in Omaha neglecting my riding, cooking for two days straight, and participating in commencement. Graduation is sort of anticlimactic when you have to go back to college on Monday after your graduation, but whatever. It was great to see the family and friends. Thanks to K,D,D for cleaning and helping with the preparation of the foodstuffs.

Now for the post point, the Elkhart TT series. Lindsey and I drove over on Thursday, competed, met friends, and returned to Omaha. Lindsey and I were excited to race; she having not raced the whole season, and me having less than a handful of races under my bibs.

My race – official start time 6:58. I was using borrowed speed, specifically the H3C Todd Lundberg edition. Hed is apparently really booked and has a backlog of wheels for weeks. Dear Steve Hed, I need a job for the next two months until I get my DDS in the mail. Think about it…Steve. Anyway, I got going and caught my minuteman in about three minutes. I can’t imagine he was happy. I was just trying to keep a high speed and push a monster gear, but did not think I could get on top of the 54X11 like I wanted. Lindsey asked me if a 11-23 would be appropriate for the race, I responded the she probably would not spin it out on this course.

Then came the turn-a-round. Routine right, wrong. I was doing a really satisfying TT and decide that I needed to make it harder on myself, so I went ahead and dropped my chain. You’ll love this, folks. I dropped the chain on the outside of the crank, the chain got caught between the crank and the 55. If that were not enough, it got stuck on some little nub FSA decide to put there for me. I fiddled with the chain, back peddled, front peddled, grabbed at it, nothing. I though the day was lost. My minuteman even caught back up to me. Embarassing. Some how, it got back on after a good 30+ seconds of toil and off to the races. All said, I came across the line in 16:14, 4 seconds in arrears of Lane for A9Y. A good day, a good effort. I could probably have not gone any harder, but I for sure could have traveled faster. Lesion learned - don’t shift at the turn a round.