"Almost" a good weekend

I will keep this short and sweet as there aren't many good points to share! The weekend consisted of the 130km Around Brunner race on Saturday followed by the 136km 2nd round of the Benchmark Homes Elite Cycling Series on Sunday.

Around Brunner was always going to be a very testing race with us and Subway wanting to make the racing as aggressive as possible. From the gun aggression was the obvious theme of the day. The race whittled down to about 20 riders by halfway where a small group of about 6 riders went up the road. Sam Horgan and I put a big effort in to bridge across to the group where unfortunately Dan Barry and I were the only Benchmark Homes riders while Subway had 3. They did what they had to and 1-2'd us which forced us to work hard to make sure none of them slipped away. With us essentially doing 50% more work covering their moves they eventually cracked us and slipped away in the final 15km. Not an ideal position to be in at all but we did all we could.

Sunday saw us shoot over to Hokitika for round 2 of the Benchmark Homes Elite Cycling series. Benchmark rider Dan Barry was in the leaders jersey before the start so we were keen to defend this as well as take the win. It was an odd race. The course was super fast and there weren't really any sections hard enough to force a successful selection. There were a couple wee hills where we were always able to split the field but it just wasn't hard enough after that for anything to stay away from a massive field of fresh riders. Because we were the biggest team we didn't want to miss any move as we would always be looked upon to do the chasing if we did. All day we had riders in every move until one slipped away with 60km to go and quickly built a 2 minute advantage over the main field. We managed to bring the gap down the about 30 seconds over the harder part of the course but couldn't quite bring it back and two riders from the move managed to stay away until the finish. We managed to salvage a little from the race by getting Dan up for 3rd by winning the bunch kick. So he still remains comfortably in the leaders jersey. However it was definitely not the result we were looking for though. Congrats to Gordy who pulled off the win and showed there is still life in those legs!

Chasing the elusive break. 

It was a solid weekend of racing. Good to get it in the legs before the Country Road Classic this weekend where Dan Barry and I are looking for a good result.

Thanks Brendan and Jodi Hart for all their help over the weekend! Also to David Letsche for the photo. You can find him at dlphoto.co.nz and Facebook.com/DLPhotoNZ.

Cheers

W