Olaf is dissapointed?

Dude, you ain't seen nothing!

I got a call from a potential new team mate for our women's team saying she needed a rider to fill in for her partner. OK, what the heck, I needed to get out on the TT bike and if I hurried I could still make the MTB race down at Fort Ord.

We had never ridden together so the main focus was communication. I would run at the front and she would dictate the pace by yelling "GO" for go faster and "UP" for slow up. My goal was to go just hard enough to make her yell "UP" every once in a while. That way I knew she was riding on the rivet. She had plenty of strength on the flats and had no problem bombing the decents at full speed. We had started to close on our 1 minute team before the first corner.
The climbs were a challenge, but I set steady tempo and paid close attention to her breathing to regulate the pace.

We did pretty well ending up with a 10th out of 25ish teams, and 2 minutes off of her time from last year. I think technically we worked the best, her communication was spot on and timed well enough so that I could back it down before she fell off my wheel.

Then I packed it up drove the suped up Durango down to Fort Ord making it with an hour to spare. I did a half lap pre-ride with the Black Market rocket and realized something is not feeling right.

The race starts all balistic like and I am doing my best to keep it together. Somewhere around lap 3 the cramp under the rib cage sent the engine room crew on strike and it was all over. Mass suckage!
So I spin for a lap to just try and recover and test some things on the bike. I made a couple of air pressure adjustments in the fork and at least ther was improvement there.