Addison Road Race

May 5th, 2007. While driving my mail truck up 15 towards Wellsboro, I started to think about the race as the sun was coming up and was beginning to wonder if my decision to work the night before the race was such a good idea. Got home about 6AM, picked up my trusty Oswald and headed off towards Addison. 7:30AM, pulled into school parking lot, parked the car and preceded to take a nap. Nap didn't really happen, too much commotion going on to allow that. 9AM, while heading towards registration I started to see familiar faces, Jared, Joe Allis, Mike M, and Dave Jelliff. Further down the parking lot, I see Josh, Tom and Jimmy. After exchanging a little pre-race chatter, I preceded to ready myself for the race.
As we waited at the starting line, the noise drowned out the race instructions. I did hear something about a chute at the finish line but didn't hear where the finish line was. As the horn sounded, we rolled out across the intersection towards Jasper. At the boro limits the pace quickened and the race was on. I picked up my pace to try to stay near the front and tucked in behind the biggest guy I could find. This worked until I decided to make my way a little closer to the front not realizing that they will let you go out front where there is a headwind. I pulled for a little while, then let off of it. There were lots of attacks but no seemed to break away. While climbing the first hill, I noticed on my right, the dynamic dual a.k.a. Jimmy G and Tom on the tandem passing me. They did this many times during the race. As we neared Jasper, I talked with Jared, he said the pace would pick up as we made the turn back to Addison and he was right. I fell off the back and had to work extremly hard to catch back up. The second half seemed to go much faster and as we neared the town limits, the pace got crazy as everyone knew the finish line was near. As I entered the chute I knew the race was over and I was happy with with my performance. I did much better than I expected finishing 3rd in my age group, Josh finished 2nd in his age group, and Jimmy and Tom finish 1st in the tandem category ,it was a great day for a race.