Five bucks and a Chocolate Bar

I wrote this last summer sometime and never posted it. Oops. Well, better out there than not. Not much to add, other than I ended up taking 3 primes over the various races. I can happily say that I took every prime that I seriously contested. That's mostly due to me just picking my battles well I think.

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Primes are a part of racing that I haven't been overly interested in as of yet. Recovery isn't really my strong suit and, as a classically pure sprinter, I tend to get one really good effort in a race, then I am cooked.

So I'm out at the Thursday nighter. My plan for the evening was to ride at the front, lifting the pace when appropriate and perhaps get into some breaks. After four laps of this, the first prime was  called. I was feeling pretty good, so my major thought was to stick near the front and if I got a clear lane, go for it. The final corner of this course is really wide and that night the front stretch had a really nice tailwind. As we rounded the corner, I was in about third place, to the back and right of the guy currently leading. He was looking solidly back over his left shoulder to watch someone else.

And he kept looking that way, for several seconds. I'm a pretty good sprinter and I've done enough of these races that I get marked now. "Well, if he's busy watching some other dude, I'm going to make him pay for it." I stood up and started sprinting, since he was looking the other way, I quickly got a little gap and once he wasn't in my slipstream, I pretty much had it with 200m to go to the line. First ever prime!