Headed off to Columbia Mo this morning for the Sho Me State Games. Not an amazing expert open turn out, but at least 11 guys in the top category, about 100 others. Broke my chain in the preride and lost a link, which in turn broke again on the first lap, i fixed, then it broke again, and i fixed. Ended up loosing my ability to run the big ring, but still took 8th even after loosing a shitload of time. Laid down a killer second lap, under 30 mins on a 7.5 mile hilly course. Not a great result because of the mechanical, but I felt good, got my pre-race rutine right, and my heart rate was there. So, I guess I am a bit dissapointed but also happy I scored points in the series. What can I say, more fuel for the fire.

Based on time, without my 12 minutes of chain problems, I would have been battling for 5th or 6th. And for the first time today, I was 3rd in the holeshot and stuck with the top two guys for the first quarter lap until my chain broke...i could taste it...and better yet i proved to myself that they are human too, and beatable. Next time hopefully I wont have such mechanical problems.

I had two key mental preparations today. 1) I put tape on my bars and wrote words to remind me to attack and to remind me of my overall goals - VERY MOTIVATIONAL. I literally must have attacked 20 times today, all over the place, and it was successful in both keeping my pace up and demoralizing my opponents. 2) I mapped the course out in GIS, made a section and studied the course for the entire week before this race. Turns out that by doing this I took all the surprise out of the course, knew exactly where to attack, knew how long the hills were and at what gradient, and had mentally beaten the course before I even arrived. I am going to map out all the rest of my races and Jeff is going to tweak my schedules and workouts based on the courses. I can see me winning with this strategy.

I also had a successful routine. I started with Bcomplex, multivitamin, L-arginine, and a peanut bar first thing at 8:30am. Had a sausage biscuit, apple pie, and coffe on the road to keep my stomach full, top of the pre-race glycogen, and get everything going. I was at the course 1.5 hours before the race and had a nice leaseurly preride, not feeling especially whoptie, but hitting 170 and 180 pretty easily. I popped a red bull at about 20 mins till race time and put myself in the 190s one time for the last preride hill climb. When the race started, i hit 195 immediately, and basically stayed there for 1.5 hours, with a 201 max. I had 1 small bottle of accelerade, a tall bottle of water with vitamin tablet, and a jelly bean pack each lap, adding a flat coke on the 3rd and last lap. Bingo.