Cologne Hyphen Close-paren#

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:40:05 +0000

That's :-) if you were wondering

Platz AK Startnr. Name                 AK  1. Hälfte 2. Hälfte Brutto   Netto
58  (22) S155     Barlow, Daniel (GBR) M30 00:41:09  00:41:18  01:22:39 01:22:27 

Not my fastest race, nor my most strategic. But my goals were "take it easy, avoid getting into fights, finish without another blood offering to the Tarmac Gods", and I have to report success on all three. Clearly there is a happy medium to be found somewhere between all-out (a number of this year's previous races) and slacking completely (today's) which I have yet to find. Hopefully next year it will be much closer to the "all out" end of the spectrum, too. But it's good to have a baseline.

Had I been taking it seriously, my prime mistake was to start too far back (you can see the difference between my gross and net times). As a result, I spent the first 5k overtaking people and eventually chasing a line that wasn't getting any closer, before deciding to give up while I still had some energy left, and wait for the next one to arrive.

Stayed on that line for the duration: speed was far too slow in the first half but picked up a bit in the second. At 40k or so I started randomly overtaking and tarting around in front in the vain hope of persuading anyone to follow me, but nobody else seemed to want to break free of the pack, so I fell back into it after a while. Then in the last 500m or so (on the bridge just before the end) there was a proper attack, so I got down a bit lower and overtook everyone again. Which was fun. I like overtaking people.