It's been a bit of a busy week so the Solstice Gravel Grind recap is a wee bit late but as they say better late than never. This year Jackie, Doug and I entered the 100 mile Co-Ed Team relay... we were all supposed to be single speeding it, I think, but Doug opted for gears the week before so it was two single speeds and some gears for the race. There isn't a single speed category, yet, so it didn't really matter what bike you decided to ride, so there is that.
When we rolled out of Fairbury it was already raining and it chased us to Beatrice which caused a rain delay and pushed the start back by about an hour while it down-poured and the thunder and lightening rolled through. Because of this, and the fact I've already destroyed one camera in the rain, the camera stayed in the car that day so most of the recap will actually be in the video since GoPros are waterproof.
I took the first leg of the relay and surprisingly the roads, for the most part, weren't horrible. Sure they were soft and there was some mud but overall for it just raining they were in decent shape. I managed to get out to a pretty good start and was cruising along until just before Harbine when we rolled onto a 4 mile stretch of super soft road that really sucked the power and the average mph. As I rolled into Odell we were sitting in first place in the relay but the 2nd place team wasn't too far behind and their second person was a young kid who was fast.
Doug rolled into the second check point in 2nd place, the youngster passed us on course, and Jackie took off trying to catch up to the now first place teams second rider. She did eventually catch up and they swapped places back and forth but in the end gears and youth won out as the finish was a slightly downhill finish and the other team had gears and we did not. They ended up pulling out the victory by roughly 13 seconds. It was a great effort by everyone and it was a great race, maybe the race of the day and to be honest we would have been happy with third if it had worked out that way. Below are just a few random pictures from the day, one nice thing about doing the relay is it gave all of us time to hang out and talk to other riders at the checkpoints.
I think the tables have been set already for a potential rematch next year but that's a long way away yet so we will see how things play out.
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