Webster-Roubaix
Webster, Florida
22 March 2008

Who raced: Sean Coleman

Sean's report:
Place: 8th
I raced Webster-Roubaix in Webster, Florida with near perfect conditions and temps in the 70's. The Roubaix races are my favorite - with asphalt and dirt sections mixed in it to make for a tough race.

This race was 180k with 3 miles of dirt roads in the 12-mile loop with about 60 riders. The race started slow but 10 miles into the race the attacks were flying. At mile 24, I went up the road with another and we had a gap of 30 seconds on lap 3. On lap 4 our time was up to 1:35 and on lap 5 we were caught, but the peloton had split. My local club teammate was supposed to cover the counter-attack when I was caught but he was in the back when the counter went with five riders as I was still trying to recover.

As soon as I stuffed two Powergels down my throat the next move went and I managed to jump on the tail end of the 6-man chase group. The motto instantly pulled up and advised us that the lead group was 1:40 up the road. After the last effort, I just tried to tail-gun it as long as I could but no such luck. The lead group was still making time on us before we all committed to the chase with 40 miles to go in the race. We worked well together but lost two riders from our chase group on the dirt section.

With one lap to go we closed to within 20 seconds and could see the lead group. The problem was we had one rider in our chase group that had a teammate in the lead group and he stopped pulling through and was waiting for a chance to jump across. Now the cat and mouse games started and the lead group started to open up their advantage. We all conceded to slug it out with each other, bad for me since they had fresher legs. I rolled in for 8th and one place better than last week. My fitness is still coming along and I felt very good with my result considering all the effort I put in.