Indiana Here We Come

We have a team all signed up and ready to ride the upcoming Le Tour de West Lafayette on May 17th and 18th. As a team we couldn't be more excited about this unique racing opportunity. It looks as though we will have another caravan driving down to Lafayette, with most of our wives and families joining us for the weekend. As far as the racing goes, the format looks great and I will curious to see how the legs react after two tough days of racing.

If my calculations are correct based on the profile we should enjoy about 500 feet of climbing per lap for 35 minutes plus two laps on the 1.3mile course Saturday afternoon. That race in itself sounds incredible, I guess we will see how all that hill training has paid off. Of course there are also the races within the race, namely the Points Competition or Green Jersey. There will also be KoM points available at two locations every lap, hopefuly everybody will bring their climbing legs. For a quick tip on climbing check out this.

Sunday morning will great the cat 4/5 riders with a 20 mile road race at 9am. If Saturdays crit course was a killer, Sundays RR has over 700 feet
of climbing per lap. Do the math on that...yep, thats right almost 3,000 feet total for the entire race. But wait there's more! KoM and Green Jersey points will also be available on this stage as well. And you thought Whitnall was a tough course.

Finally the Tour wraps up with an individual TT in the afternoon. In case your legs aren't toasted yet, the 5.8 mile TT course has at least 300 feet
of climbing. At least the TT is only one loop. It appears that there will be no need for a TT specific bike here, as you won't be able to gain any aero advantage with all that climbing. The TT will be run in reverse order of GC after the Stage 2, so staying in the front group in both the Crit and the RR will be imperative. At least this way the riders starting their time trials later in the rotation may know what time to they have to beat.

This should be a great experience for us overall. Yes, we will be suffering like dogs the entire weekend, but we will be so much stronger for it. As of today there are only 25 registered riders for the 4/5 race and we have 5 of them. The only other team sending a full compliment of riders will be Wild Card Cycling. I believe we will be sending a high caliber team to Lafayette, and with some strategizing and hard work we have a shot at doing very well in three competitions as well as the overall.
Apparently there is more than corn in Indiana!