I love this course. It’s in downtown Bend. One lap is ~.6 miles and it has 5 corners including 1 chicane. This was my first OBRA race so I got to ride with a (mostly) different group of people than normal which can be refreshing.

The race was at ~3pm. In the morning, we opened up the legs a bit and then had breakfast at like 10am. I opted to eat a bigger breakfast and sustained myself until the race with like a banana and some gels. Before the race, I had a caffeineited SiS Beta Fuel (40g of carbs). This strategy worked well. While warming up, I used an ice sock in my jersey. It was 85 degrees F so this made a huge difference. I could have also used one at the start of the race but didn’t.

The best place to move up was into corner 1 or in the back straight away before corner 5. Before corner 5, there was also a headwind/crosswind. The field usually sat up here. It was a good place to test the field. I had to pedal through all corners - average cadence for the whole 45 minutes was ~87rmp. Because I could pedal through all the corners, I had my best 2m power — 454 (6.2 w/kg). This was during the final 2 laps.

I tried to be pretty active during the race and I stayed towards the front. In the first few laps, I sent a test attack to see who would respond. It was a gap I couln’t sustain for the remainder of the race but thought that it was something I could try again with 2 or 3 laps to go. A few more times I was in small breaks with other riders. Sometimes with 1 or 2 other people. Other times, it was several. It tough to get the smaller groups to organize and hold the gap.

When it got closer to bell lap,