OSPREY TTT Report – Course: Greater London Flat
Team:
- David Elliott
- Michael Naessens
- David Lee
- Jerome Vaganay
- Greg Fox
- Stewart Sayer
- Sam Nelson
- Jeff Arnier Sr.
Well done Ospreys. We accomplished what we set out to do. We declined a PL slot this week because the PL time zone is not friendly for us. So we had a little chip on our shoulder today. We gave no quarter to the other Latte teams racing in our zone 7 and our time was faster than 7 of the Latte PL teams who had raced earlier. Happy days.
Sometimes things just happen for a reason. We had a 13-minute pen delay today. I was concerned about cooling down too much in the pen. At my age that is a real issue. As it turned out the 13-minute delay worked to our advantage. In the pen my Discord wasn’t letting me hear the others. I tried logging in and out but nothing worked until I forced quit the application and then it updated. Once logged back in I could hear everyone. But for the extra pen delay time I would not have had the time to get Discord communication back. Then Sam was in the pen safely but had a Zoom meeting to attend while we waited. The timing was perfect as he finished the meeting just before our start time. Again, the 13-minute pen delay turned out to be a good break. Who would have guessed? We did have a casualty with the Discord update, however. 20 seconds before our start David Elliott’s discord decided it needed to update. After we started David was trying to get Discord up on his PC but lost contact with the group and pulled the pin on the race. Lastly, Stewart’s Discord dropped 10 seconds before our start but fortunately, he kept a watch on the time and was able to start with us.
This course lends itself to our simple race strategy. We start with Stewart pulling us out of the pen and quickly up to speed. We wanted to average between 41 to 42 kph for the race and that meant riding over that limit on the flats. The plan was for Stewart, Sam and myself to do the pulling on the flats with the others leading the charge up the hills. As we rotated through our pulls Greg joined in adding a welcome 4th in the rotation. This simple race plan was sufficiently executed by the Ospreys to keep the tempo high through the first lap. On the second lap we were still a tight group of 7. I need to give a special mention to Jerome, Mike and David Lee. They dug deep to hang on the second lap. Mike later said he rode 80% of the race at his threshold. That is never a pleasant feeling. Well done Mike. Our goal was to be sub-42 minutes. As we got down to the last 5km it was going to be close to reach our time goal. We had to go full gas to the line. That popped Mike and David with Jerome hanging on until the last km. We raced to the line with a time of 41:52 and an average of 41.41 kph. Currently with one zone left we are 7th overall and have a probable PL invitation for next week. We will have to decline the invitation again due to time zone issues but will continue to race hard every week and show we are worthy opponents in the Latte division.
