This was my 2nd race since arriving in Spain and my 2nd Spanish Cup, a series of 10 races with the best U26amatuers in Spain. This was round 6 and a fairly bumpy parcours of 153km, so was suitable for the task at hand.
The motivation was to make the mommoth drive wothwhile and also was my birthday-eve!
The trip set off on a bad note though, both our team vans had been vandalised with each having 3!! flat tyres.....that sorted and we got on our way.
Not a whole lot happened in the race for me until 100km, it was too fast and not hilly enough to get away, also needed to shake the legs out a little after the drive. The first and main climb was at 97km, it was a cat.2 of about 8km, I was feeling pretty good so about ½ way up I jumped away and rode through afew people until reaching the lone leader, the 2 of us reached the top with a 30sec lead and 50km to ride, not much to work with but there was a lot of damage behind us. We stretched our lead to a max of 1min over the next couple of cat.3 climbs but the gap was decreasing slowly, at 15km to go we were on an easy climb with about a 40sec gap, I was starting to think about going solo after my team told me this guy was quick in the sprint but decided to wait, I thought id blown it by not going thinking that was the last climb but fortunately there was another at 10k to go, the gap was closing and the two of us were kind of looking at eachother not willing to give it %100 just to tow the other guy to the finish(well thats how I felt anyway), 1km from the top when the gap was just under 20secs my companion said something in spanish which I interpreted as 'im going back to the group'. Great....time to go! I hit it just incase he changed his mind and the gap started to increase, pulling back out to 35secs on the 15 or so remaining riders.
The last 2km were abit of a false flat hill and the finish couldn't have come soon enough, I did get there though and with 25seconds to spare!
The team had won a race the day before aswell so were a bunch of happy campers.
Next up is another Copa in Galicia in a weeks time, another big drive so will be trying again.
Cheers, Mike.
