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First place overall!🏆
This was one heck of a ride for sure. I didn't seep much for the two nights prior to the race. For only getting about 3 hours of sleep the night before the race I was amazingly full of energy. Starting off in the race, I didn't push too hard as I didn't want to burn out in the early stages. It was cool out, almost to the point of shivering, but I quickly warmed up.  The roads in the beginning were in fairly good shape and with good shoulders. I found myself out in first place early on, but that quickly dropped back to second and then a back and forth between second and third for quite a few hours to follow.

By time the sun came up the temperature was slightly warmer and we picked up a slight breeze from the west. That turned out to be perfect as we had roughly 50 miles of fairly flat roads with the wind at our back and we made fantastic speed. By time we got close to the Wisconsin state line, it started to get hilly and the sun was warming things up a bit too. As the heat climbed, my power started to drop a bit. From about 1-3 pm I wasn't feeling much like pushing hard on the pedals. I was still in second place, although, occasionally dropping to 3rd.

About 5 hours into the race my Achilles Tendon started to hurt a little bit By mid day, my right knee was starting to hurt too. Throughout the rest of the day, both of them would take turns at who could hurt the worst. But, sometimes they would take a break and give me a chance to cycle in peace. In hind site, I feel like an idiot because I had packed a roll of KT tape and should have stopped to tape up both of them... A mistake I won't make again.

My crew and I also had some growing pains early on in the race doing hand-offs for food and water. It's something we watched videos on and talk about how we would do it, but never took the time to practice doing it before the race. Also, I knew how to handle the flat tire we had half way through the race, but I never even discussed with the crew how we would deal with that (sorry gang). Needless to say, we made some mistakes, but we worked through it and didn't loose too much time because of it. In fact, I think our biggest loss in time was in full stops for bathroom breaks. That might probably eclipses even the flat tire change. We could have been much better at breaks.

Moving along... we managed to make it through River Falls and pressed on down towards Pepin with plenty of daylight. I was not anticipating to be doing so well and had expected it to be dark before I got to these areas.  At one point it started to rain and I sat in the truck for about 10 minutes. I hate riding wet. But by this point I was also feeling competitive with holding onto second place. So when I got passed, I jumped back onto the bike and went at it again. Thankfully, the rain stopped within about 30 minutes, so it turned out to not be completely miserable.

Taking back second place, we pressed on through the gorgeous countryside and turned westward back into Minnesota. The hills were getting more frequent and steeper and just before sunset we came up on the first place rider. He was riding a recumbent and looked like he was having a hard go of making it up the hill. I passed him thinking we would be doing a back and forth to the finish, but I never did see him again after that.

Night fell and the cold started to come in. At first I welcomed it, but then it began to really slow me down. My power was dropping and I was experiencing finger dexterity issues. We finally just came to a full stop. I put on some arm warmers, cold weather leggings, and put on my rain vest to shield my torso from the wind. I also took the time to shovel in a ton of food which I knew I wasn't eating enough of.  Getting back into the saddle, I was amazingly more energetic than I had expected and we pressed on towards the finish.

In the last hour or so, the limited amount of sleep I had and the long day of riding was starting to take its tole. I asked my crew how far back the guy was in second place to see if I could back down on power and still securely hold onto first place. Unfortunately, cell phone reception was poor and even when we had it, the crew was having difficulty getting the live track website to refresh on their phones. So, we soldiered onto the finish without backing down too much. In the end, I found out we were 45 minutes ahead of 2nd place. :)

The ending felt a bit anti-climactic. It was my A-Race of the year and now it was over. Even more odd was the knowing I took 1st place and there was no podium, no fanfare, no trophy or champagne bottles... It just felt weird. Even now reflecting back, it's like "Wow.. I won. Ok... What does that mean? And, now what do I do?" At the least I know what to do... take a little bit of time off to let my tendon heal. The other thing I guess is to put this behind me and start focusing on the next big race and pick out next years A-Event/Race.

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Craig Haydock

Minnesota RAAM Challenge - 2017 - 1st Place

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