Sunday morning might have been typical for Spring with buckets of hard pounding, big droplet, cold, torrential rain that felt like sleet at times, pouring down in low 45F temps but not exactly what we were hoping to race in. The picture below was not a pond but a big puddle that just formed on the side of a road leading into the Prospect Park's parking lot!

The final race of the NYC Spring Series had about 50 riders lined up for P123, 3/4 and M35 categories in total so they decided to have us race as one field doing 11 laps or about 38 miles, racing for one purse and one overall series point placing.

Pace was fast from the gun and the pack strung out quickly. I held in for 4 laps but then drifted back on the hill as a break attack was forming in the front. The laps I did felt very bad, feet were too cold and soaked to feel anything and my total concentration was on being able to see where we were going, amount of tire spritz was unbelievable.

Before the race started our Lance was awarded the leader's jersey again with # 2 just 4 points behind and # 3 about 30 points behind (there were 81 points up for grabs for this race's winner).

In total maybe 5 out of 50 guys were Cat.3/4, 25 were 123 and 20 were masters. Zach and Lance were very strong from the start and stayed near or at the front.

Lance was in an early break but got reeled in a few laps later.

Then around lap 5 a two men break formed, not in point contention, and the pack allowed them to have about a minute. The chasing pack would fight it out in a sprint finish.

They charged fast and wide across the road. Zach was right near the first row with only a bike length between the top 10 guys, Zach got 9th in the sprint which gave him 11th because of the 2 that soloed in earlier.

Lance rolled through without sprinting in about 20th and we later found out his hands were so frozen that he could not feel his fingers to switch gears or grab the handlebar to sprint safely. So with other 2 overall contenders placing well, the top 3 flipped to end up with Lance in 3rd overall which is still super. And he did win the overall Cat.3/4 series by like 200 points. Extra icing on this carrot cake was that our team also got 4th and 5th in the 3/4 series overall. That's 3 greenbeans in top 5 for the series! Sweet!