I felt great coming into Dolan and the course suited me pretty well; nothing technical, a nice hill and long, sweeping turns. I rested up, felt good, got some rest in and shit should've gone well, but the day would unfold in the opposite manner.
I got there early to keep Mike and the dudes at the CycleLife tent company and made my first mistake of the day. I hadn't changed my tires from Battenkill and thought that there was no way that my Gatorskins were worth of a course that really only had one turn. Despite having eternal bad luck with GP4000s, I decided to change them before the race. More on that decision later.
Warmed up a bit early and it was ridiculously windy. I noticed that no one in my race was warming up and found out that it was actually delayed by 35 minutes due to a crash in the women's field. There was no sense in just sitting around, but I also didn't need a 1.5 hour warm since I would be racing the 3/4 and then the 4/5 immediately after.
Got a great position, but missed the clip in 4 times. Somehow I never miss it riding around, but can never get in during races. Spent the first two laps using a bit of energy moving up to the front of the group, which was actually pretty easy because people were taking the hill extremely slow and I was able to crawl by and slip in on the right. No moves went and I felt good as long as I could keep that front position. On lap 4 I moved up to the top 15 and then I noticed that my rear tire felt lumpy. Four seconds it let out a gunshot-volume bang and my tube burst. With no free laps the 3/4 was now over for me. I'm not sure if the tube was pinched or what happened, but it blew the bead off of the tire so I had fun limping back to the tent and spending the rest of the race changing my tire.
There was quite a delay to the start of the 4/5 and I finally got a good line up and clipped in first try. I got lucky and got a good position, but I was soon reminded that 4s love to attack en masse from the start despite the futility of the moves. I covered a few of the ill fated moves and between myself, Will, and Chris it was quite easy to have a rider in every move or bring them back. The first 5 laps were a bit much and in retrospect a bit pointless, but with the hill being extremely slow, the slow section into the wind on the backside, and the cramped nature of the right hander it seemed that perhaps someone could make a move off the front and have it stick. The rest of the race rode in a pretty odd way; every lap consisted of people taking it painfully slow on the back section, accelerating on the downhill, and sprinting out of the turn only to all but sit up on the climb. I mistakenly ended up on the front a few times after the climb just because I tried to keep the pace high enough to avoid having to small ring it. After Black Hills I really expected the pace on this section to be much faster or a move to go, but none did.
Some DC Velo dude with the Pro track stem attacked with two to go and it didn't stick and a few other people went as well. Greg Capelle from Toms went and I knew that if I latched on it would be a solid move. I countered and latched on, but then remembered that we had two to go and thought that maybe Greg had made a mistake. He had and he crossed the line with his arms up on the bell lap and was reabsorbed. Meanwhile I dropped back to probably 20th in hopes of latching onto Chris' wheel with the goal of going early on the hill. Despite warnings from other people not to go on the left, I saw dozens attacking on the right and didn't want to get caught in a clusterfuck of ill-fated moves.
I turned up the pace a bit at about 600 to go up the left hand side and was making a bit of progress when a strategic mastermind decided to sprint out of the middle of the group without looking. After taking out almost six people he decided to swerve left and almost pin me between his squirly self and the median. Lucky for me I was able to swerve out in the section where there was no median. My attempt at anything meaningful was ended and I soft-pedaled across the line in some shit position. Another race with no meaningful result and I was pretty frustrated that I decided to avoid the rain the day before and stay home instead of race Chantilly.
The course was a bit boring, but the wind and the hesitancy to make a move in a sensible spot contributed to that greatly. A lot of matches were uselessly burned at the beginning of the race and while things felt good it was a bad idea to cover any of those moves. At the end of the day I felt lucky to have avoided being crashed into the median and not get involved in the wreck in the 3/4.
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