Three Races In One Weekend For Josh Qualls

Decided that I was ready for some suffering to see how my training did over the winter. I drove down to Tennessee for the Three River Rumble in Kingston TN. (About 4.5 hours from home) 

It's a 2 day 3 race event. 

Day one: Time trail in the morning and a Crit in the afternoon. 

The time trail was a great course with a few fast turns and a couple of small rollers. I held a 25.2 mph average (on a regular road bike) with a max speed over 34 mph. Placed 3rd with just 4 seconds between 2nd and myself.

The Crit

The course was a figure 8 set up with 8 turns in .8 miles. It was fast to say the least. You were either going into a corner, in a corner, or coming out of one the entire race. 

The field was small, which meant more work. No time for resting. We averaged 22.6 over a 30 minute race. 

I was very impressed with the Novatec Impulse Wheelset with the Kenda Kountach mounted on them. I was taking more than 90° corners at speeds of 26+ mph and was never worried they'd lose grip. Grabbed 3rd place again for the second time in one day.

Day two: Road Race

Oh my! Where do I start with this race. With 90% chance of rain in the forecast, I was a little nervous.

20 minutes before my start time the rain let up, only for it to come down harder as the whistle blew. Off we went with 26 miles of hard racing ahead of us. With 11 riders in the group, we stuck together for the first maybe 2 miles. As we crested the first climb, 4 of us had a small gap on the others. We made the descent at speeds of 35+ mph the sky threw everything it had at us. I was soaked to the bone within 4 miles of the race. The 4 (two guys were on the same team) of us worked together to get a nice gap in between us and the peloton. 

We had a 3 minute lead at the half way point. Did I mention that it was raining?? Hard??

The teammates attacked and left me and the other guy working hard to catch up, which we failed....

So it was him and I going for the last podium spot. With 2 races in my legs and him not racing the day before, I didn't have enough gas in the tank to keep him from taking it away from me. 

3rd was just out of reach but happy with 4th place after the weekend I had.

On the 26 mile course I averaged 22.2 mph with 1400+ in climbing. 

I'm so glad I had my Sigma Rox 10.0 set up to alert me with a tone about my heart rate because I couldn't see it the entire race. 

I'm calling this weekend a huge success in my books. I was the only one who had raced all 3 races during the weekend that were in the top 5 of the road race. 

P.S. Shout out to Amino vital for keeping me hydrated even though there was plenty of water coming out of the sky and off the tires in front of me, I still managed to down a full bottle of the Amino vital Pro grape in the road race.